When the holiday season arrives, consumers increasingly turn to Twitter to discuss what they’re thinking about buying, according to a new report that social media consultancy Converseon produced on behalf of Twitter.
The report finds that shopping-related conversations jump an average of 83% from 8 p.m.-midnight across the season and soar 87% on Sundays in November, when retailers often release their weekly promotions.
Converseon based its report on an analysis of a random subset of holiday-related conversations between Sept. 1-Dec. 31, 2014.
Retailers who understand how consumers use Twitter can find ways to interact with shoppers and help drive them to buy, says J.J. Hirschle, Twitter’s director of retail sales.
“Retailers can use Twitter to make sure they’re surfacing precisely the right messages to shoppers at just the right time, whether it’s offering discounts and offers during the planning stage, staffing up their customer service initiatives around big moments like Black Friday or Cyber Monday, or allowing last-minute holiday shoppers to purchase directly within a tweet,” he says.
For example, 80% of holiday shopping tweets in September and October are “pre-purchase” conversations, Converseon says. Retailers can help insert their companies into the conversations by launching campaigns built on the types of conversations shoppers are having on Twitter, Kara Louis, a Twitter research analyst, writes in a blog post.
For instance, Best Buy Co.., No. 14 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide, last year ran a campaign that urged shoppers to use the hashtag #HintingSeason to help it become a part of shoppers’ conversations on Twitter.
By late November, particularly around Thanksgiving, 26% of holiday-related posts involve the overall shopping experience. The consultancy says retailers like Kohl’s Corp. (No. 22), have helped make their brands top of mind by launching campaigns to engage shoppers on Twitter. For instance, last year Kohl’s ran a Thanksgiving week “Frozen” trivia contest on Twitter that sought to let shoppers know that the mass merchant carried a lot of “Frozen” merchandise. The campaign helped the retailer have the highest average engagement rate on its Twitter posts during the holiday season.
Shoppers are also increasingly focused during November on getting product information and customer service issues addressed, Louis writes. “It’s crucial for retailers to check their timelines twice and ensure no direct message goes unanswered,” she writes, pointing to a recent Millward Brown report that found that when shoppers received a response to their messages, 77% felt more positively about the brand.
Finally, in December, 55% of Twitter holiday conversations involve shoppers discussing their shopping progress. That includes consumers writing about their frustration with limited product inventory and running out of money and time to buy gifts. About 20% of December holiday-related tweets reflect sadness or anger about holiday shopping, and those messages offer an opportunity for savvy retailers, Louis writes. For instance, last Christmas morning Walgreen Co. (No. 44), used Twitter to remind consumers it was open for last-minute shopping.
Of course, Twitter’s effectiveness as a marketing channel during the holiday season relies on shoppers using the platform. And only a few weeks after rolling out Twitter Moments, its latest attempt to attract new users, the social network on Sunday began testing a new ad format called Promoted Moments that lets marketers pay to have a Moment appear in users’ feeds.
Promoted Moments are a so-called native ad unit in that they look and feel like the other Moments in users’ Moments guides. The only difference is brands create them and they feature a “promoted” badge. The ads appear for 24 hours.
“We’re seeing how powerful this experience can be for diving into meaningful narratives—and since Twitter’s inception, brands have told some of the very best stories on the platform,” Bobby Grasberger, a Twitter brand strategy manager, writes in a blog post.
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