Black Friday Goes Social
November 14, 2011
Thanksgiving is right around the corner, which means retailers are pulling out all the stops to prepare for their own important tradition, Black Friday sales. Most brands have already started online campaigns to get customers excited about the upcoming sales. Brands offering online deals and using the web to promote their sales is nothing new. Cyber Monday, the online equivalent to Black Friday, has been an extremely successful component of holiday sales for some time. Last year’s Cyber Monday sale set the record for the “heaviest spending day in e-commerce history” according to TechCrunch. What is new is the increasing number of brands working with social media agencies to find creative ways to incorporate a social element into their holiday sales.
This year some stores are offering their social media communities a chance to get involved in choosing the deals themselves. Four of Amazon’s subsidiary companies, soap.com, diapers.com, wag.com and yoyo.com have launched a campaign called Battle of the Brands on their Facebook pages that lets fans vote on which products they would like to see featured in Black Friday sales.
Sears is also inviting fans and customers to vote on sales by incorporating voting into their early-bird specials in the weeks before Black Friday. They’ve added a program called People’s Pick to their website that lets visitors choose a category and vote for their favorite deal. Voting runs Sunday through Thursday. The deals that receive the most votes are available Friday and Saturday.
Allowing fans to vote on which products they’d like to see sales offered for is a great idea. It gets people talking about your brand, and encourages them to share your posts with friends to get them to vote as well. It also gives customers a more personal interest in going to the store or website to purchase the deals they voted for.
