I don’t watch a lot of reality TV. In fact, I don’t really watch any, but thanks to my roommate, earlier this week I was introduced to TLC’s Extreme Couponing. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it’s a series that follows a shopping trip by the kings/queens of savings as they turn large purchases into pocket change. These people stack coupons on top of in-store savings on top of other deals to get the best deals I have ever seen in my life. In the episode I watched I saw a woman go to the grocery store and purchase over $1,900 worth of items for only $103. It was one of the most incredible things I had ever seen.

The show got me thinking though. Not everyone is as extreme as the people featured on this show, but everyone loves a good deal if they can find one. Not only do people like to find a good sale, but they usually like to share it as well. What better place to do that than via social media? So, I decided to a little investigating using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytic software.

Doing a search for the terms “sale” or “coupon” showed me that for the past six months there has been 13.2 million blogs, 10.3 million tweets and 9.3 million forum postings mentioning these two words. Granted, not all of them may be using them in the context that I was looking for, but I was searching out of sheer curiosity and not exact  scientific proof.

What was most interesting about my findings was that different mediums seemed to peak in their sale and coupon talk at different times, and not all around Christmas as I had initially thought they would have.

I broke the mediums down to get a better idea of just when the sale and coupon talk was happening. On Twitter I found that the most talk about sales and coupons happened right around American Thanksgiving. This is most likely due to all the sales that happen the day after, known as “Black Friday”, the day that everyone starts their Christmas shopping. People were talking about all the deals they had found and were sharing with others where to go to get these savings.

Over in forums, I found a large spike around the same time as on Twitter. However, it’s interesting to note that there was continuous talk about sales and coupons almost all the time, so the Black Friday spike doesn’t look as large as it does on Twitter.

I found looking at blogs to be the most interesting though. I expanded this chart to show a year’s worth of activity to show you what I mean. During the year there is a build up of talk about sales and coupons that one would think would peak around the same time that Twitter and forums do, but instead blog talk peaks in January.

Just to be sure that this peak wasn’t due to the sale of a large company, I dug deeper into the January spikes. Looking at the analysis from our buzzgraph though, it shows that most of the words being used had to do with actual sales and coupons and not some big sale of a large company. Perhaps this is due to retailers having to clear out leftover stock from the holidays.

Something else interesting I found while investigating this was who was actually talking about these deals. In blogs I found that women were talking about sales and coupons most by holding 70% of the blog conversations.

However, over in the forums, males were the dominent conversation drivers at 74% of the conversation. I couldn’t find any real explanation for this other than a guess that males are more likely to post in a forum than females (but again, that’s just a guess).

Lastly, I decided to do all of you loyal readers a favour. I decided to help you find the best deals through social media by putting together some lists of the top Twitter accounts and forums that talk about coupons and sales.

Top Twitter Accounts Talking About Sales and Coupons:

Top Twitter Accounts Talking About Sales and Coupons:

Do you know of any great places to find deals and coupons online? Do us a favour and share them with us and our readers in the comments.

Happy shopping!