US Retailers turn to Social Media on ‘Black Friday’ – Social Media Ideas for Your Business >>>
Posted by Nick NichollsNov 27
US retailers were on Friday unleashing a traditional barrage of post-Thanksgiving holiday shopping promotions, with the National Retail Federation expecting 134m Americans to head for the stores.
This year, however, the retailers have reinforced their traditional efforts with an array of social-networking weapons including Twitter, the micro-blogging website.
Retailers including discounters Target and Walmart, and department store groups Macy’s, Kohl’s and JC Penney have used Facebook pages to publish the “doorbuster” and “early bird” deals traditionally announced in newspaper advertising inserts on Thanksgiving, the day before “Black Friday” – so called because it was once the day on which retailers’ ledgers for the year moved out of the red and into the black.
Brad Smith, head of social networking at Best Buy, said the electronics retailer had targeted its more than 1m Facebook fans when it decided this year to publish its Black Friday deals early for the first time.
“We released the deals at 2am last Sunday, and even at that time of night we had literally 1,000 responses within an hour or two,” said Mr Smith.
Best Buy is also using Twitter for the first time to publicize its “deal of the day” running on the shopping days leading up to Christmas. “This is the first year in which social media is playing such an important role for all of our marketing,” said Mr Smith.
Other stores planning to use Twitter to pull in shoppers include Target, JC Penney, American Eagle and Nordstrom.
Further, more than a dozen top retailers are launching customised mobile e-commerce sites ahead of the holidays.
Alongside traditional buy-one-get-one-free deals, more conventional strategies have included stores opening early, with Toys R Us joining a handful of retailers that planned to open at midnight for the first time. Some stores, such as Old Navy and Gap, were even opening at midday on Thanksgiving itself.
Other retailers including Target, the discounter, and Abercrombie & Fitch, the clothing chain, are for the first time offering money-back gift cards on sales.
Toys R Us is also seeking to woo shoppers by guaranteeing the first 100 people in queues outside its stores the chance to buy a $10 Zhu Zhu Pet robotic hamster – the season’s hottest toy.
But the retailers’ promotional activity this year will also reflect less desperation than last year, when the slump in spending after September’s Wall Street slide forced drastic price cuts to clear stock. Clothing retailers in particular have entered the two-month holiday season with inventory levels that are more than 10 per cent below last year.
In spite of the marketing hullabaloo, retail analysts point out that the day is not necessarily an indicator of how retailers will perform over the entire holiday shopping season.
Mike Niemira, chief economist of the International Council of Shopping Centers, said that the day was “typically is not a precursor of the entire holiday season’s sales picture”. by Jonathan Birchall
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