Home
Products
Solutions
Reports
Company
Blog
Contact Us
Client Login

Posts Tagged ‘analytics’

« Older Entries

The Buzz Around Facebook’s IPO

Everyone knew it was coming, but yesterday Facebook officially filed for an Initial Public Offering, more commonly known as an IPO. Not knowing exactly when the IPO would be filed and announced, I started doing a little research into what the social world was saying about it yesterday afternoon. About 20 minutes after I thought I had enough information to write about, Mark Zuckerberg dropped the news. So, for the most part of this post I’ll be looking at the chatter that led up to the IPO announcement, and then I’ll look at what occurred after.

As I said before, everyone knew that Facebook had been planing to go public for a while. In the past six months (up to about 3pmEST yesterday) I had found “Facebook” and “IPO” mentioned together in 33,452 blog posts, 38,215 online news articles, 5,904 forum postings and 68,143 tweets.

Trending those mentions out overtime we can see that the topic had been part of conversations for a while. We can also see from some spikes in activity when certain new news came to light. For instance, the spike that we can see at the end of November and beginning of December was when a story broke that Facebook was looking to file the IPO in the spring of 2012. That soon changed though as the large spikes right at the end of the chart were people talking over the past few days as they knew the IPO was shortly coming.

I also looked at which countries the talk was coming from. The US, both home to Facebook and the stock exchange the stock will eventually be traded on, accounted for about half of all the conversation. However, we can also see that a lot of countries with strong social media usage also had their eyes on the story. Countries like India (2.9%), Singapore (2.8%), Indonesia (2.1%) and even China (5.8%).

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to get an idea of what the conversation over the past six months had been about. Whats most interesting about this buzzgraph is how many other “social” companies’ names we can find in it. It seems that talk about Facebook’s IPO has been compared to other social networks who have recently gone public like “Zynga,” “LinkedIn” and “Groupon.”  We can even see that Facebook was being compared to “Google” who went public back in 2004.

I then dug a bit further into the activity around Facebook’s IPO in the past week (up to about 3pmEST yesterday). Here the buzzgraph seems to be a bit tighter on the conversation and definitely more focused on Facebook’s IPO. The greater connections we can see in this buzzgraph link to financial institutions. We can see “Morgan” “Stanley” in the graph because it became public knowledge last week that Facebook would be using them to underwrite the IPO. We can also see “Goldman” “Sachs” in there because they had strong financial links to Facebook in the past and it came as a surprise to some that they were passed over for Morgan Stanley.

Now, as I said earlier, most of this data I collected just before 3pmEST yesterday. A short while after that, around 4:30pmEST, the news of Facebook’s IPO broke. I took the liberty of trending out at an hourly rate the talk about Facebook’s IPO over the past two days. Now the chart below looks like a lot of no activity before a huge spike between 4-5pmEST yesterday. However, most of the time leading up to the announcement was averaging between 500 and 700 mentions of an hour. Those mentions vastly pale in comparison though to when the announcement was made and we see the large spike in activity. Between the hours of 4-5pmEST yesterday we saw Facebook’s IPO being mentioned 14,761 times.

So, will you be buying some Facebook stock?

By Sheldon Levine - February 2nd, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Announcements, Samples, Social Media

Was Your Community Manager Appreciated?

This past Monday was the third annual Community Manager Appreciation day, a day to celebrate all the hard work community managers do that sometimes goes unnoticed. Started back in 2010 by Jeremiah Owyang as a way to pay tribute to the people that are behind the scenes of thriving online communities, the knowledge of the celebration has grown as the job has become a lot more common at many companies. Some people think that community managers are the people that play on the internet all day, but really they’re the heart of a community for a business. From my own experience I can tell you that community managers handle almost all functions of a company at some level. They can be PR, marketing, sales and customer service all at the same time. As you may guess, I do have a personal affinity for this day.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics tool, I decided to take a look at just how much online talk was going on about Community Manager Appreciation Day. Since many community managers these days work in the social space, I thought that would be the best place to get the information from. Looking for the term “Community Manager Appreciation” or the few forms of the “#cmad” hashtag, I was able to find 114 blog posts, 74 online news articles, 80 forum postings and 4,744 tweets.

I then took a look at where this semi-holiday was being celebrated. The USA provided the most talk of Community Manager Appreciation Day at 55.2%. This is likely because a lot of companies have their head offices in the US, so that is likely where the community managers are also located. The UK had the second most talk with 15.8% followed by France, where there’s interesting social media happenings, at 10.2%. Canada, where this community manager is located, only accounted for 4%.

Next I pulled up a buzzgraph which shows us words that we find most connected to our search terms. Right in the center we can see Owyang’s name. He was brought up a lot in conversation as the man that first came up with the idea for Community Manager Appreciation Day. We can also see strong connections to “happy,” which was people celebrating, and “thank,” which was people thanking the community managers for doing what they do. The thing that threw me off in this buzz graph was the “23-oct.” After a little digging into it, I found that a social publishing platform company called Vitrue is holding an award for best community managers and submissions are open until October 23rd of this year.

What’s interesting is that when I pulled up a word cloud around the talk, Owyang actually takes a back seat to the community managers. He appeared in the center of the buzzgraph because he was mentioned a lot in when people were talking about Community Manager Appreciation Day. However, the word cloud shows us the words that are being used most often, and as you can see, it’s the community managers that were being talked about the most on their day.

Lastly, and the thing that makes me the happiest, was the sentiment I found about Community Manager Appreciation Day. To be honest, I’ve actually never seen this before in any analysis I’ve done. Community Manager Appreciation day received ZERO negativity. However, positive sentiment was at an astounding 77%.

For some more information on community managers and a nice infograph, check out Social Fresh’s 2012 Community Manager Report.

By Sheldon Levine - January 26th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

The Day The Internet Went Dark

You may have noticed yesterday that some of your favourite sites on the internet weren’t as they should be or were shut down all together. This was a large initiative by many internet based companies to protest the Stop Internet Piracy Act (more commonly known as SOPA) that was scheduled to be voted on in the US yesterday. Some of the sites that went black included Wikipedia, Reddit and even smaller sites like popular blogger Chris Brogan’s site.

For those unfamiliar with SOPA (and a similar bill known as PIPA), here’s a great video that explains just how it would affect everyday internet users like you and me:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Because these bills are heavily supported by the US entertainment industry, there has been very little talk about them in the mainstream media. Most people know about it because everyday people had taken to the internet and social networks to help spread the word. And spread it they did. I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to see just how much talk had been going on through social media.

To be inclusive of the numerous sayings and hashtags people have been using I searched for the terms “SOPA,” “PIPA,”StopSOPA,” “SOPAblackout” and “blackout.” Over the past 3 months I was able to find 247,213 blog posts, 82,713 online news articles, 311,327 forum posts and 2.9 million tweets containing my search terms.

Trended out over time that activity looks like this:

Because yesterday was a known day of protest the activity greatly overshadows all the previous activity. The following popularity chart shows the activity for three months up to January 17th, the day before the blackout. The first large spike in November was when the SOPA bill first started getting attention by the public. Then there were two large spikes in talk in December. The first, on December 15th, was the day that the US government passed NDAA, a non-internet related but also unpopular bill and people made connections between the two bills. The second spike in December was the day that the public became aware that the popular internet domain seller Go Daddy was supporting the SOPA bill. Go Daddy later retracted their support, but the public had already spoken.

While SOPA and PIPA are both bills that could be passed the United States government, they would have a great effect on the way the entire world uses the internet. That’s why the entire world has been talking about the bills. The greatest majority of talk through social media was coming from the United States (53.5%), but other countries were making their thoughts on the bills heard. Brazil, a large Twitter using country, accounted for 5.5% of the talk, followed by Spain (4.9%) and the UK (3.9%).

And just what have people been talking about? Our buzzgraph shows that “piracy” is right in the center of the conversation. But there’s strong connections to words like “protester,” infringement” and “censorship” showing that a lot of the talk was against SOPA and PIPA. We can also see a lot of talk about the websites that went black yesterday in opposition to the bills like “Wikipedia,” “Reddit” and “Google.” There’s also a strong connection to “Go Daddy” from that large spike in November that talked about their support of SOPA.

I already noted that talk on January 18th greatly overshadowed the previous three months, so I dug into the conversation that just happened yesterday. On blackout day alone I was bale to find 32,548 blog posts, 13,107 news articles, 18,504 forum posts and 1.4 million tweets containing my search terms.

All of the talk and support from everyday citizens led to the bill being temporarily shot down and not voted on yesterday as was originally planned. However, PIPA is still set to go in front of US congress on January 24th, so the internet blackout happened just as it was planned. The fate of the internet is still up in the air, but if enough people raise their voices, the people with power may just get the message that there has to be a better way to solve the piracy problem.

By Sheldon Levine - January 19th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Samples, Social Media

Tebow Takes on Twitter

Tim Tebow may be the most popular man in sports right now. He was a first round draft pick the NFL’s 2010 draft. He became the Denver Broncos’ starting quarterback part way through the 2011 season and has lead them on a wild charge ever since. His celebration ritual has spawned an internet and photo meme known as “taking a Tebow.” And as of Sunday, he can say that he is also a Twitter record holder.

This past Sunday during a Broncos’ game against the Steelers, Tim Tebow threw an 80-yard touchdown pass in overtime to win the game for Denver. The crowd in Denver went wild, but even more so, Twitter exploded with tweets about Tebow. Right after the touchdown pass Twitter recorded 9,420 tweets per second, making it the second most tweets per second for a single event. It was however the record for a sporting event.

I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, to look a little bit deeper into the event. I found that it wasn’t just Twitter that was talking about Tebow. On Sunday, January 8th, I found Tebow mentioned in 2,549 blog posts, 1,495 online news articles, 22,950 forum posts and 484,946 tweets.

While 484,946 tweets doesn’t sound like a giant amount, it’s much larger when most of the tweets happen at almost the same time. Also, I pulled up a popularity chart of mentions of Tebow on Twitter over the past six months and found that this one day was almost the amount of tweets on his last most popular day.

I also found something interesting when I looked at where all the tweets were coming from. Surprisingly, Colorado didn’t even come close to being the state that produced the most tweets about Tebow. Neither did Pennsylvania. The top three states that were talking about Tebow were California, New York and Florida. Colorado actually tied for the state with 9th most Tebow tweets with Virginia and New Jersey.

Lastly, I took a look at the talk surrounding Tebow in a buzzgraph. Not surprisingly the Broncos are right in the center of the conversation. We can also see strong ties to the Steelers and the score of the game, 29-23. We can also see that Tebow’s winning touchdown pass was also a main part of the conversation as we can see from strong connection to the term “80-yard.”

With every NFL fan now with their eyes on Tebow, I wonder if he could set another record next week? Or maybe at the Superbowl?

By Sheldon Levine - January 12th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

Happy (Social) New Year!

New Years is a friendly time of year. Everyone likes to wish others a happy New Years, regardless of if you know them or not. You say it to the clerk at the grocery store, your neighbor that you only see once in a blue moon, even the random group of strangers you pass on your way home from your new years party. If we do this in real life, it’s not hard to imagine that we also take to social media to spread New Years cheer to the entire world. And we do. In fact, in Japan when midnight struck, the Japanese sent 16,000 tweets a second and actually crashed Twitter. So just how much New Years well wishing was being passed through social media? I took to MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software to find out.

Looking for mentions of “new year” and “new years” on December 31 and January 1 I put together some numbers of people mentioning it through social media channels. From those two days alone I found 299,583 blog posts, 44,376 online news articles, 342,361 forum posts and 9.2 million tweets mentioning New Years.

Looking at where all the talk was coming from I found that the US had created 53.9% of all the mentions. The UK had the second most mentions with 11.5% and then Canada with 5%.

However, because such a large amount of media comes from the US I thought that this even seemed a little weighted. Because of this I decided to look at the geographical distribution on Twitter. Here, the top three countries remained the same and in the same order, but the US had been taken down to 43%. As well, the other category above (across all social channels) accounted for 19.7%, while just on Twitter the category accounts for 27.8%. And although Japan was able to crash Twitter with so many New Years tweets at their midnight, they didn’t seem to produce as much as some other countries over the span of two days.

A heat map of Twitter New Years mentions shows us that tweets were in fact being produced by people around the globe.

Pulling up a buzzgraph of the overall conversation I found nothing but good wishes coming from the social media world. Words like “happy,” “happiness,” “wishes,” “celebrate” and family.

Another word that I found in the buzzgraph that was popping up a lot was “resolution.” The new year is a time when a lot of people make resolutions and I found that a lot of them made them publicly through social media this year. I added “resolution” and “resolutions” to my original query and found 41,972 blog posts, 4,518 online news articles 18,431 forum posts and 321,265 tweets about New Years resolutions. Think they’ll be kept?

Happy New Year to you and yours from all of us at Sysomos! Hope 2012 is great for you!

By Sheldon Levine - January 5th, 2012 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

Social Media in 2011

2011 has been a pretty big year in terms of social media.

We’ve seen new social networks appear and flourish like Quora, Google+ and Pinterest. We’ve seen big changes in some of the major social networks like Facebook’s Timeline, a running history of your online life, and Twitter taking a more strategic role as to how people are using the network and how they can start to generate revenue from it.

As well, we’ve seen a large uptake in the use of social media, both from the general public and from businesses with some pretty cool results. With all that said, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at how people talked about “social media” in 2011 using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software.

Going back to January 1st of this year and searching for the terms “social media,” “socialmedia” and “#sm” I pulled up some general stats around all the social media chatter this year. For 2011 I found social media mentioned in 2.2 million blog posts, 1.4 online news articles, 295,354 forum posts and 12.1 million tweets.

Trended out over time, talk of social media for the year looks like the chart below. Twitter of course dominates because of it’s quick and easy to use nature. It’s interesting to note that blogs and online news about social media seem to follow in a very similar pattern. I also did a little extra digging into the largest spike on the chart around, June 30th. It turns out that June 30th was Mashable’s Social Media Day, so there was even more chatter that day using the words “social media.”

Next I took a look at where all the talk was coming from. The following chart represents all social media talk across all the channels we cover combine. We can see that the USA controlled a large portion of the conversation at 56.8%. The UK was the second largest producer of social media talk about social media with 16.3% and Canada came in third 5.7%.

I then dug a little deeper into two main social media channels to look a little closer at the demographics. When I looked at just blogs, I found the USA still lead in conversation about social media, but this time they only accounted for 47%. Here again we also see the UK with the second most conversation (11.4%) and Canada rounding up third (6.0%). We can also see that the “other” category accounts for a lot more in blogs by making up 21.5%, which means that blogs everywhere seemed to be talking a lot about social media this year.

So, just who was doing all this blogging about social media? I first looked into the gender breakdown. It turns out males account for 60% and females for 40%. While not even, I think that those numbers are fairly close considering the amount of blogs about social media we saw this year.

Something I found interesting was when I looked into the age of the bloggers. While most people think that social media is for the younger generation, I found that the age group that blogged most about social media was those aged 36-50 years old with 37.5%. Bloggers aged 21-35 came in second with 33.3%. Those aged 51 and over made up 25%, while the youngest set, 20 and under only accounted for 4.1%.

Next I look at the industries that were blogging about social media throughout 2011. A little surprising, but education blogs actually held the greatest amount of conversation with 17.3%. The second most amount of social media conversation came from blogs in the communications and public relations field at 15.2%. The thrid place spot was tied between marketing blogs and those focused on the internet with 8.6% each.

I then headed over to Twitter. Here I found the same pattern in terms of who was talking about social media by geographical location. The US made up 49.7% of the conversation, while the UK followed8.3% and Canada coming in third with 5.5%.

The gender of Twitter users talking abut social media seemed to be a bit more split however. On Twitter males accounted for 64% of people talking about social media while the females made up the other 36%.

Lastly, I headed back to take a big picture look at what people were actually talking about when they were talking about social media. Pulling up a word cloud that spans all social channels it seems that business seemed to dominate the conversation about social media for 2011. We can see that words like “business” and “marketing” seem to be some of the largest words in the cloud meaning they came up the most. We can also see that “Facebook” and “Twitter” seemed to be the the two social networks that were talked about the most (which isn’t very surprising as they’re the two most adopted networks).

So how was your 2011 in terms of social media? What were your highlights? Let downs? Lessons learned? Let us know in the comments.

By Sheldon Levine - December 29th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Samples, Social Media

The NBA is Coming

In a little over a week, NBA fans will get what they’ve been wishing for for months, the start of this year’s basketball season.

The season starts around the end of October or the beginning of November but this year the season isn’t starting until Christmas Day after the owners locked out the players in July due to a disagreement over a number of money related issues.

On Nov. 25, NBA fans received some good news when the owners and players reached an agreement that bringing back the 2011/12 season (albeit, a bit of a shorter than normal one).

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I took a look at some of the buzz around the NBA over the past few months. I decided to do my search from September 1 to today because September was about the time it started to look as if the NBA season wasn’t going to start on time.

Since September 1, the NBA mentioned in 331,502 blogs, 381,672 online news articles, 865,524 forum posts and 3.8 million tweets.

Taking those numbers and trending them out over time gives us the popularity chart below. All of the small spikes in activity levels were days when there was some sort of news about the lockout.

For example, the second largest spike on the graph was on November 14 when the players rejected a deal and people really started to believe there would be no basketball this year. The largest spike on the graph, of  course, is on November 25 when the players and owners finally came to an agreement on a deal that would get everyone back to work, and allow fans to see a shorter season.

The buzzgraph from this time period shows that “lockout” was definitely the center of conversation. Some of the strongly connected keywords also focus around those involved, such as the “league,” “players,” and David “Stern”, the NBA’s commissioner. We can also see teams and popular players names also appear in the buzzgraph, but a lot of it is talk that happened after November 25.

I also looked at the conversation that have happened since the new collective bargaining agreement was reached. Since November 25, I found 84,633 blog posts, 89,264 online news articles, 252,730 forum posts and 1.4 million tweets mentioning the NBA. That means 37% of the Twitter conversation over the past three and a half months happened in the past three and a half weeks.

When we looked at the buzzgraph for this time period, we can see a lot more team and player names appear. This is because during the lockout, teams weren’t allowed to trade players or sign free agents, so the Web has been abuzz about the action in the past few weeks.

So, who’s ready for some basketball?

By Sheldon Levine - December 15th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Samples, Social Media

Browser Wars Continued

Last week a new report came out about the most popular internet browsers. Yes, I know I covered this topic a few months ago, but this new report made it seem like a good time to bring it up again. According to the Wall Street Journal, the report says that Google’s Chrome browser has overtaken Mozilla’s Firefox as the number two browser in the world. Internet Explorer is still the most used browser, but Chrome isn’t doing too badly considering it only arrived on the scene in 2008.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, I thought it would be interesting to look at how each of the four top browsers around the world were talked about in social media this year. Comparing Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, I found some interesting things. The first interesting thing being that by looking at share of voice the browsers were talked about more according to their use. Internet Explorer, the most widely used browser, actually accounted for just slightly over 50% of the conversation.

If we look at the actual numbers, Internet Explorer was mentioned almost 10,000,000 more times than the second most used browser, Chrome, this year.

Broken out over time we can see that Internet Explorer started off the year with a lot of talk, but then slowly went down as the year went on. The talk at the beginning of the year focused around the coming of and then release of IE9. At the same time, we can see that talk about Chrome actually rose ever so slightly throughout the year. Firefox, on the other hand, seemed to go down very slightly throughout the year. The only time that Firefox surpassed Chrome was in March when they released Firefox 4.0.

I then looked at the sentiment around each of the browsers. Chrome, seemed to have the most favourable talk about it. With 13% of the talk about Chrome negative it has the least amount of negative sentiment of all the browsers. However, Internet Explorer had the same amount of positive talk as Chrome. It also had the most amount of negative sentiment, which left IE with the least favourable talk.

Chrome

Firefox

Safari

Internet Explorer

Lastly I decided to break the browsers down a bit further and look at the activity by channel for each browser. Usually when I do these searches Twitter dominates most of the conversations. However, in this search I found that with talk about Firefox, Twitter and Forums were about even with 1.9 million mentions per channel. As well, talk of Internet Explorer in forums overtook Twitter by over a million mentions. Below I also included word clouds for each of the browsers. What’s interesting in the word clouds is that you can see that each of the other browsers is mentioned as well, which means that when people talk about one browser they like to compare it to the others.

Chrome

Firefox

Safari

Internet Explorer

So, what browser do you use?

By Sheldon Levine - December 8th, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Samples, Social Media

MOustache Season Comes To A Close

As the month of November comes to close we bid a fair adieu to all the wild moustaches that show themselves but once a year. That’s right, by the time this post is up MOvember will officially be over (but I’m sure you can still donate). For those not in the know, all the creepy moustaches you’ve seen over the past month have been part of a world-wide charity effort to raise money for prostate cancer research and have a little fun while doing it. Well, we started off the month with a MOvember blog post, so I thought it only fair to close it the same way.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics software, I decided to take a look at MOvember activity throughout social media for the month. Keep in mind though, at the time I grabbed these numbers MOvember was still not “officially” over. During the entire month I was able to MOvember mentioned in 15,284 blog posts, 6,056 online news articles, 18,753 forum posts and 55,199 tweets.

Trending those numbers out over the month we can see that there was an enormous amount of talk as MOvember kicked off. During the month it slowed down a bit, but was still garnering around 13,000-14,000 mentions a day. Then as the month closed we can see another rise in activity as people scrambled to get last minute donations.

Next I looked into which countries were creating the most buzz about the charity movement. The US had the most at 32.5% of the conversation for the month. They were followed by Canada with 23.5%, then the UK with 23.2% and Australia (where MOvember originated) with 8.2%.

Since I’m already on the topic of countries, I headed over to MOvember.com and pulled up the list of money raised by country. I’m happy to say that my home of Canada had raised the most money for prostate cancer research with over $34 million. The other countries that created the most buzz were also in the top four money raising countries as well. That said though, every country did a fantastic job as every dollar helps!

 

I then pulled up a buzzgraph to take a look at what all the conversations over the month were about. No surprise that the main topic of discussion was about moustaches (spelled in a few different ways). We also see a lot of talk about “fundraising” and “donate” as people were mainly talking about collecting donations on behalf of the charity. Not to be forgotten though is the cause, and we can see that “prostate” and “cancer” were strongly connected to the conversations.

Lastly, I pulled up the overall sentiment around the MOvember talk. I’m glad to say that all the talk throughout the month showed a 88% favourable rating. I can only assume that the 12% of negative talk was coming from women who couldn’t wait until their man shaved his moustache off.

Finally, I’m proud to say that the bigwigs here at Marketwire+Sysomos generously agreed to match donations raised by all of our teams up to $5,000. While I don’t have our final numbers, as the west coast is still collecting donations as I write this, I can tell you that we exceeded that number. That means that over $10,000 will be donated to help fund prostate cancer research from the Marketwire+Sysomos family!

I hope you all had a fantastic MOvember and raised some money for this great cause. Happy shaving!

By Sheldon Levine - December 1st, 2011 - No Comments »
Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Events, Samples, Social Media

Black Friday and Social Media Buzz

Today our friends in the US are taking the day off to enjoy some time with family, friends and some turkey. While this may be a restful day for most Americans, all that will change tomorrow on the US’s biggest shopping day of the year, Black Friday. We’ve all seen the videos of people lining up the day before and some people getting trampled on Black Friday just so others can get a TV for a super cheap price. With such a big hype around the deals and savings for Black Friday I decided to check out the buzz in social media about it.

Using MAP, our social media monitoring and analytics platform, I searched the social web for mentions of Black Friday. Since the beginning of the month I was able to find 434, 497 blog posts, 37,961 online news articles, 108,209 forum posts and 701,564 tweets talking about Black Friday.

I tracked the conversations all the way back to then beginning of November and we can see that as Black Friday draws closer the talk about it continues to pick up steam.

A look at a heat map of the USA shows us that all the sates seem to be tweeting about the shopping day. California is the darkest on the map meaning the most talk about Black Friday is coming from there, followed by New York, Texas and Florida.

I then thought that diving a little bit deeper into all of this information could help show what people were going to be looking for on the Black Friday shopping trips. I started with the buzzgraph, which shows us the words being used most in conjunction with my search term, but didn’t seem to get anything here. The words that seem to be most connected are more general such as “Thanksgiving,” “cyber” (as in cyber monday) and “retail.”

I also found the same sort of results when I looked at a word cloud using the same search terms.

To delve a little bit deeper I decided to see if our entities tool could help pull out better information as it searches the content for proper nouns. Searching Twitter led to very few results, but searching through the blog and forum posts about Black Friday yielded some insights into what people will be shopping for. On blogs I was able to pull out a few items that seem to be on people’s shopping lists like HD tv’s and new cameras. As well, we can also see people talking about where to get the best deals like Best Buy and Amazon.

I then moved over to forums, because as I’ve noted in a previous blog post, forums seem to be used the most when it comes to sharing deals. In forums though, the results seem to be a bit more scattered. We can still see some products like “notebook computer” and “PS3,” but they seem to only be a minor part of the conversation. We also see places to get some of the best deals again like “WalMart,” “Best Buy” and “Amazon.” However, one thing that seems to be more apparent here than in blogs are numbers. Some of these may be product codes as it’s easier for people to search for products online using those codes, but some may also be savings codes to help people save even more money. Some of these actually look like phone numbers to me. It’s hard to say exactly what all the codes are for, but it’s quite apparent that they are there.

Then, just for good measure I decided to take a look at the other end of the upcoming weekend at what is known as Cyber Monday. Like Black Friday, Cyber Monday is known as a day to get good deals, except most of these deals are for online shopping only. Since the beginning of November I found 118,217 blog posts, 10,287 online news articles, 5,371 forum posts and 31,417 tweets about Cyber Monday.

I also pulled up the entities list for forums talking about Cyber Monday. Here we can see much more of a product orientation, with electronic and digital products being the main focus.

From what I was able to see here today, it looks like electronics are what everybody will be shopping for over this upcoming weekend. Do you plan on taking advantage of these deals? What are you looking to pick up?

By Sheldon Levine - November 24th, 2011 - 3 Comments »
Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Samples, Social Media

« Older Entries
© Copyright 2005-2012 Sysomos Inc. All rights reserved.