React: Which Retailers Saw Success on Black Friday and Cyber Monday?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the biggest shopping days on the planet – so along with Small Business Saturday and every other Thanksgiving shopping event imaginable, we knew there would be a whole lot of social data to analyze.

Looking to Twitter, and after running the data through Brandwatch Analytics, we specifically looked at what people were talking about buying, and from who, this year. We did this by analyzing Tweets in which users expressed an intent to shop or purchase, or other opinions about the shopping events.

Which brands and retailers cleaned up this weekend? And what type of product was most popular? Let’s find out.

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The hottest hashtags

When it comes to hashtags, other topics can sometimes make their way into a completely separate conversation – as seen when we analyzed all mentions of Thanksgiving holiday shopping activities from the holiday weekend and the top retailers, brands and products on Twitter’s collective mind.

Looking over the last week at the top 10 hashtags mentioned in our data set around Thanksgiving holiday shopping (ranked by total number of Tweets), we can see that Chris Brown’s new album #Royalty made its way in, thanks to the timing of its release, as well as Brown’s decision to donate proceeds from the album to a children’s hospital.

When we ranked the top hashtags by impressions, Barnes and Noble’s signed editions activities around Thanksgiving weekend helped the book retailer get involved in the conversation online, with a slew of mentions specifically about Paolo Coehlo’s The Alchemist.

Khloe Kardashian’s new book #stronglooksbetternaked also featured in the chatter, as consumers snagged the book this weekend during general shopping excursions.

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What did consumers want to buy?

Conversations about Thanksgiving holiday shopping peaked on Black Friday, and the conversation has quietened down today, given the usual excitement around electronics deals on Cyber Monday.

 

 

Over the last week, clothing (41%) just missed the title of being the most talked about product type for this holiday shopping occasion.

While mentions of clothing spiked on Black Friday itself more so than electronics, toys and home goods, electronics still dominate with 1% more share of voice in the last 7 days, for a total of 42% share of voice.

 

Looking at conversations around product types through a gender lens, we can see that only in the category of electronics do we see men having a higher share of the mentions —and barely that, with just under 55%.

 

 

Diving deeper into what was driving the high volume of electronics conversations, the graphic below shows us the most mentioned topics and phrases specifically related to that product category.

The specific devices on the tip of Twitter users’ conversations include the Apple Watch, Xbox, PS4, iPhone 6s, and MacBook.

A tweet using a meme of Rocky by actor Sam Kalidi made its way into the most mentioned topics as well in the electronics conversation.

 

 

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The brands ruling Twitter

Strong gaming/gadget players Apple and Playstation secured solid second and third place positions in the Twitter conversation, after Victoria’s Secret.

 

 

 

 

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Retailer rankings

Amazon holds onto its massive share of voice with 29% of mentions on Twitter over the last week.

 

Since Black Friday the conversation in general across the board has died down, but Amazon has considerably more mentions in the last 24 hours over all other retailers. Why? A number of reasons, and that includes that sheer number of products and types of products and deals Amazon has available. Not to mention discussion of Amazon around Thanksgiving holiday weekend shopping was bolstered by mentions of the company’s Amazon Kindle Fire 7″, even if purchased from other retailers.

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Tweets by @BW_React

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