#blackfriday saw nearly 3.7 million tweets globally on Friday, as retailers across the globe marketed their heavily discounted products and services to consumers. A relatively new concept for the South African market, we ranked 17th on the Twittersphere when it came to #blackfriday.
Traditionally, the day after Thanksgiving Day in the US, Black Friday has, at least since the 1930s, marked the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Retailers traditionally opened very early (sometimes even the night before) to offer promotional sales.
As was expected, the bulk of the tweets, 62.52%, originated in the States. What’s interesting to see though is that #blackfriday made its presence felt across the globe. The United Kingdom contributed 15.47% to the day’s total tweets and even though South Africa ranked in 17th place, we were still ahead of many large first world countries.
“Music and social media competitions still achieve good results as can be seen by the top retweets on 27 November,” says Marius Greeff, commercial director at SPARK Media.
@kendricklamar achieved over 26 000 retweets with the tweet “Black Friday. gift from @JColeNC ”, while Kohl’s (@Kohls) managed over 22 000 retweets for their “Is there someone in your life who’d love an Xbox? RT for your chance to win! #KohlsSweepstakes #blackfriday”.
