Photo by jenny.nash712
Cyber Monday, the Monday after Black Friday in which companies provide some pretty awesome sales and prices on their online stores, was big this year. Sales from last year increased and, to me, it looks like social media was a huge help to this Internet shopping phenomenon.
According to comScore, “U.S. online sales for Cyber Monday amounted to $1.25 billion, up 22% from 2010′s record highs” as well as separate reports from IBM and eBay discovered “that U.S. sales increased by 33% and 24.6% this year.” Also discovered, mobile sites and Facebook pages were the bigger players when it came to where traffic was coming from, but stats show other sites, like Twitter, helped as well. (Read more stats from Mashable.)
What this shows us is brands, companies and stores were able to reach out to their key audience at a better degree than last year and that’s, mostly likely, from the added bonus of social media. They could alert their fans about the sale they were having on Facebook, use key hashtags to join the exchange on Twitter, I’m sure many invested in video advertisements utilized and shared via YouTube as well. And what better way than using those channels (where all the conversation is these days) that are already online to drive traffic back to your online website?
I thought it was pretty neat to see social media, as large as it’s become, being used for Cyber Monday this year. I believe it helped with the increase in sales because, like I mentioned above, that’s where the conversation is. The conversation is on Facebook and Twitter. People are turning to these social networking sites for events, news, sales, etc. more and more these days and they know they’ll be able to find that information (unless a brand or company isn’t utilizing social media…if that’s the case, I know someone who can help).
Did you find any good sales via a social network on Cyber Monday? If so, which one(s)?
