The holiday shopping season officially began in the USA on the day after Thanksgiving. Retailers there are putting in every effort possible to attract more customers and that includes making use of popular social networking sites like Twitter.
One of the largest U.S. retailers, Target, has already made use of Twitter’s Promoted Trends service to advertise their deals. Other large department stores such as BestBuy and Walmart are making use of Twitter to tweet about deals.
BestBuy, a popular electronic equipment retailer has the largest number of followers on Twitter among all the retailers. Kate Kaye from Clickz reports that BestBuy posted 70 tweets on the 26th of November (Black Friday) highlighting the various deals they were offering clients. They also posted their Cyber Monday deals on Sunday itself to entice buyers earlier. This is an interesting move, as reports from comScore suggest that Cyber Monday was the second largest spending day last year, with sales of $887 million taking place on that day alone.
$1 Billion Sales Record
This year too, an estimated 88% of U.S. online retailers took part in Cyber Monday sales and some of them even offered week-long deals. The efforts seem to have paid off well, as comScore reports that Cyber Monday sales for this year hit an all-time record, surpassing the $1 Billion mark!
Among other retailers, Walmart, which has over 90,000 followers on Twitter had 49 posts on Black Friday, with several deals being offered. Home Depot also had 41 posts fro Black Friday advertising items ranging from ornaments and tiles to appliances. Other U.S. retailers who made use of Twitter for Black Friday included Staples, Sears, Macy’s, Lowe’s, J C Penney and Kohl’s.
Kohl’s promotes shopping deals on their Twitter account
Target is believed to have spent thousands of dollars to sponsor their Promoted Tweets a week before Black Friday.
These figures indicate that Twitter in particular, and social media in general, are becoming extremely popular advertising channels and small businesses should also start taking advantage of them in order to reach a larger audience.
