Despite the negative nature of pre- and post-election social, Americans seem to at least be on the up and up when it comes to shopping.
According to an analysis of social conversations conducted by the Marketing Cloud social team at Salesforce, nearly 80 percent of all Black Friday conversation have been positive in nature in the 30 days leading up to it. Salesforce—which so far has tracked 934,000 mentions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday—said 78.6 percent of posts have been positive, with leading topics including deals, the season and online shopping.
The volume of social conversation about Black Friday seems to keep growing, with 2016 up 30 percent over 2015. (Last year, overall volume was up 20 percent over 2014.)
So who's doing all the shop talk? According to Salesforce, 56 percent of dialog is coming from women. Also notable is that the higher percentage of mentions isn't coming from social-savvy millennials—the largest group has been consumers between the ages of 25 and 34, with the 35- to 44- year-old demographic also contributing more than other groups. (In fact, younger millennials were talking the least, with only people over the age of 65 talking less.)
Retailers getting the most mentions include Amazon, REI (which is once again closing its stores on Black Friday as a follow-up to last year's award-winning "Opt Outside" campaign), Best Buy, Walmart and Target. Of those, Amazon leads the way, with 15 percent more mentions than anyone else. Xbox One has received the most mentions for a product brand—thanks to its "15 Year of Xbox" campaign—more than Apple, Samsung, Microsoft and Playstation.
However, others think social conversation around Black Friday might soon be in the red. According to data from Crimson Hexagon, Black Friday mentions on Twitter have continued to decline when measured by the number of posts proportionate to the rest of Twitter. In 2010, there were 35,000 posts per billion, while last year only had around 5,000 per billion.