All the big stores try to attract the highest number of customers for Black Friday, supported by a huge marketing effort on all fronts.
As providers of social media marketing solutions, It seems natural to us to use social media analytics to try and predict who will win this battle. Who will attract the most customers? Who will generate the highest volume of sales during Black Friday 2013?
First of all, the chart below, generated using eCairn Conversation, shows that social media started buzzing about Black Friday at the end of October.
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Let’s consider that the big players of Black Friday are Amazon, WalMart, Best Buy, Target and Sears. Which of these players generated the most conversations in social media over the past month?
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The chart above shows that WalMart, Amazon and Best Buy seem to be the winners of Social Black Friday.
There are many peaks in the graph above. The highest one occurred on November 22nd, with a large number of conversations mentioning Walmart in connection to Black Friday. Going back in time with the eCairn database, it appears that November 22nd was the day Walmart kicked off a pre-Black Friday saving event in stores and online. (http://news.walmart.com/news-archive/2013/11/19/walmart-turns-up-holiday-heat-matches-competitors-best-black-friday-deals-one-week-early, http://www.technobuffalo.com/2013/11/20/walmart-will-match-black-friday-deals-starting-friday-nov-22/)
Let’s now compare the tribes discussing Black Friday in conjunction with Walmart, Amazon and Best Buy. Indeed, these are three players with three different business models: Walmart is a general retailer, Best Buy is a specialized retailer and Amazon is an e-commerce business.
Note: The tribes “Mommy – Coupons & Giveaways” and “Mommy – Frugal Lifestyle” are the top two tribes discussing Black Friday in connection with all three stores, Amazon, Walmart and Best Buy. Therefore, it is not meaningful to consider these tribes in our analysis. Consequently, the analyses below are analyses of Black Friday mentioned in the same context as Walmart, Best Buy and Amazon, without considering the “Mommy – Coupons & Giveaways” and “Mommy – Frugal Lifestyle” Tribes.
Here is the pie chart with the Top Tribes discussing Black Friday and WalMart:
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Below is the pie chart with the Top Tribes discussing Black Friday and Amazon:
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Below is the pie chart with the Top Tribes discussing Black Friday and Best Buy:
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The tables below synthesize the 3 pie charts above. The first table shows the top 5 tribes talking about Black Friday in connection with each of Walmart, Amazon and Best Buy. The second table shows the top “Black Friday events” by tribe, based on the volume of relevant conversations generated by each event:
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A few interesting insights can be drawn from these graphs and tables:
- First, the Frugal Tribe discusses Black Friday a lot. In the context of the Frugal Tribe, it seems that Black Friday is mainly about saving money.
- Many tech tribes (Personal Technology, Geeks, Wireless/Mobile, Android, Apple) are discussing Black Friday. This may be because technology devices are traditionally viewed as the most interesting items to purchase during Black Friday.
- The “Personal Technology” tribe is mostly talking about Black Friday in connection to Best Buy, which is consistent with the tribe’s interests in electronics, Best Buy’s domain of expertise.
- The Android tribe mentions Black Friday more frequently than the Apple tribe. This doesn’t come as a surprise since Apple doesn’t really observe Black Friday.
- One last interesting finding is that the influencers from the Wholesalers & Retailers tribe are more likely to mention Black Friday in conjunction with Walmart or Amazon than Best Buy.
This is just an overview of what you can do with eCairn Conversation. If you’re interested in digging deeper, seeing richer analytics, and finding out who are the influencers driving the conversation about Black Friday, please email us at conversation@ecairn.com.
Happy Thanksgiving! Happy Black Friday! Image may be NSFW.
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