With Thanksgiving now in the rear view mirror it’s time to shift gears as the Christmas season begins in earnest.
Retailers in Europe and North America in particular will be preparing both online and offline sales channels to make sure their Christmas marketing campaigns are successful.
The holiday season also sees hundreds of thousands people take to social media platforms to tweet, post and blog about their favourite products, gifts, brands, food, you name it, there’s probably somebody, somewhere posting about it!
With so much social data available – there were over a billion mentions of Christmas on social last year - we decided to use the Talkwalker social media analytics platform to give e-commerce sites, retailers and even individual online sellers some tips on using social media insights to help run an effective social media campaign.
And for more in-depth insights into exactly how e-commerce brands and online retailers can use social listening, read our new report “Campaign Cracker: How to Run an Expert Social Media Campaign Using Social Listening” on the Talkwalker Academy.
Tip #1: Time Campaigns To Match Christmas Buzz
When exactly does the Christmas season start?
It’s a matter of some debate. In the US it may be after Thanksgiving, in the UK it may be when major retailers start broadcasting their Christmas Ads. Using social media analytics, however, we can get an idea of exactly when and at what volume the social conversation is taking place.
The graph below shows the social buzz around Christmas 2014 from the end of November to just before Christmas:
What we see is three clear jumps in the lead up to Christmas: the first right after Thanksgiving, the second in the first weekend of December and the third on the final work days before Christmas week. By targeting social media campaigns to coincide with peak Christmas buzz, brands can get more bang for their social buck over the holiday season.
Tip #2: Leverage The Most Popular Products on Social
For retailers and e-commerce sites alike, knowing which products to feature in stores or online is no easy task.
There are hundreds of categories and hundreds if not thousands of products in each. Social media analytics can help you sift through millions of posts to understand the social sentiment towards a range of products.
Here for example are the most discussed smartphones on Twitter (from top to bottom) and the social sentiment towards each over a one month period between October and November 2015:
In terms of total social media mentions, it was actually the iPhone 6S that came out on top, but as we can see from the graph above, the Nexus 5X and Blackberry Priv have the highest share of positive comments.
This kind of data gives online retailers instant access to public opinion on products that can then be used to make better decisions when featuring products in marketing campaigns.
Tip#3: Optimize Campaigns by Most Used Devices
These days it’s not uncommon for people to own a laptop, a smartphone and a tablet and even to be using all three at the same time.
But exactly what kind of activities do your audience use each device for?
Talkwalker social media analytics can breakdown the devices that your audience is using to interact with your social campaigns. And perhaps more significantly, it can also see which devices your competitors’ audience is using too.
Here are the devices used most frequently to interact with the main Twitter channels of eBay and Amazon over the last month:
Straightaway we can see that Amazon are getting a lot of interaction on mobile, while eBay are seeing more engagement coming from laptops and desktops (as indicated by high usage of the Twitter official website).
With this data brands can target campaigns to make sure they are optimized for the device their audience is using the most. Campaign managers can also examine competitor performance and see how their performance compares.
So when you’re planning or more likely, refining your campaigns over the coming month, remember, social media analytics can help you every step of the way.
And for a more in-depth look at using social listening for E-commerce download our latest guide “Campaign Cracker: How to Run an Expert Social Media Campaign Using Social Listening”.
