Twitter was the go-to social media platform for many retailers during the most recent holiday season.  For example, during the 2011 holiday season, Best Buy just bought ads on Twitter to promote sales during the week of Thanksgiving.  During the 2012 holiday season, Best Buy’s strategy included an eight-week Twitter barrage that involved Twitter “parties” which were hour long blocks for groups of people to gather on Twitter and exchange gift ideas.  Best Buy also bought ads to encourage Twitter users to post jokes or photos of something blue on Twitter while they were waiting in lines for Black Friday deals.

In 2011, Radio Shack used Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare for its holiday marketing campaigns.  In 2012, Radio Shack’s “24 deals in 24 hours” campaign only appeared on Twitter.  During this campaign, Radio Shack gave clues to riddles in tweets and rewarded customers with $100 gift cards.

Consumer-to-consumer conversations about holiday deals, gift ideas, and shopping tips were everywhere on Twitter during the 2012 holiday season.  During the week of Thanksgiving, there were over 6 million Twitter posts related to Black Friday.  According to Twitter, three times as many retailers bought ads on Twitter in 2012 than in 2011.  To continue to grow this market, Twitter is developing a new system that lets retailers target ads to Twitter users based on their hobbies and the brands they track on Twitter.  Twitter suggests that for consumers, the tone and signal of personality and authenticity of retailer messages are very important to consumers.

Discussion Question:

How have retailers made Twitter an important component of the communications mix?

 

SOURCE: Shira Ovide, Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2012