It’s that time of the year again: Thanksgiving. For many Americans, this is the time of the year to spend time with family and thinking about the things they’re grateful for. For retailers on the other hand, it’s the best time of the year for shopping: the day after Thanksgiving is unofficially the start of the holiday shopping season.
Black Friday
Since the early 2000s, #BlackFriday is known as the beginning of the Christmas shopping season in the US; most major retailers open very early and offer lots of promotional sales. As ecommerce has become more popular, the shopping frenzy has continued all weekend, culminating on Cyber Monday, the online equivalent of Black Friday. The deals on Cyber Monday are online-only and generally offered by smaller retailers that cannot compete with the big retailers.
Social media is having an increasingly significant impact on Black Friday sales. For example Target, increased its social media budget by a massive amount in preparation for holiday shoppers. “… because that’s where our consumer is,” said Jeff Jones, CMO at Target.
Publishers reporting on this year’s Black Friday madness can provide a broader perspective on the phenomenon through social media curation. You can create search streams, e.g. on #BlackFriday, and geo-locate this search for specific areas where people intend to go shopping; they won’t miss out on a single deal and they know if and when they’ll need to avoid the busiest shopping malls.
Turkey & Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without the turkey. Side dishes at Thanksgiving dinners vary. In some parts of the country, you’ll find mashed potatoes and gravy on the table and in other places, sweet potato pie. But no matter where you celebrate Thanksgiving, one guest is pretty much guaranteed an invite to the table each year — turkey!
Many people share their holiday moments – pictures of turkeys, before and after cooking, massive spreads of food, the kitchen sink full of dirty dishes – with friends and family on social media, mainly on Instagram. In 2012 and 2013 Instagram broke records, making Thanksgiving the most popular, busiest holiday on Instagram. “… We are truly humbled that so many of you choose to capture and share your holiday moments on Instagram,” said the company.
Highly Sophisticated & Based on Relevance
Crowdynews can help publishers take advantage of all that great (visual) content that’s out there during Thanksgiving to augment any editorial content you’re publishing over the holiday weekend. Our platform provides you with a social media stream that displays only relevant content — and in real-time. With turkey not only being a bird, but also a country, it is important to separate the two when gathering social media posts in your social stream. Commentary in tweets or posts can make the difference – and that is exactly why contextual relevance is so important.
Our social media curation platform is highly sophisticated: the platform uses advanced technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) to properly analyze a news article and its related social media content. Also content is based on relevancy: using artificial intelligence (AI), the platform finds the most relevant data out of millions of articles and social media posts.
Happy Thanksgiving!