Social Media Drove Just 1% of Black Friday Online Sales

We are learning more every year about how consumers are melding the ephemeral and the physical, especially when it comes to shopping.

We already know that the traditional or historic experience - assuming we are ready to call anything related to our few years of ecommerce reality by those terms - are losing their meaning. Black Friday sales begin earlier and extend into what used to be considered the holiday shopping season. Cyber Monday, supposedly 'the day' for online shopping began sometime in October and may never end.

So what we are discovering is that consumers are effecting their own brand of convergence. They may do some in-store shopping but comparison shop online or they may combine a trip to the mall with a review of online offerings.

But as the data to which the title refers suggest, social media companies have a long ways to go if they expect to justify their pricey stock valuations. It seems that consumers are fitting social media into the mix as a way of comparing plans or maybe ideas but the record to date implies that the various social platforms are not yet, if they ever will, serve as the base for shopping expeditions in any context.

The reasons for this may be that they are just not as efficient, that they are simply one more variable or source of information but not as useful as others to make themselves a priority - or it may be that consumers view them as having other uses  not directly related to purchase decisions. This may not render them totally without value to advertisers and merchants because information or attitudes gleaned on those sites could inform subsequent behavior, however subliminally. The broader implication is that as an economy and a society, we are still experimenting with the cornucopia of inputs we have available and the choices we make about how to use them may not always match the aspirations of those creating and investing in them for reasons it may take us yet more time to better understand. JL

Seth Fiegerman reports in Mashable:

Just about 1% of purchases and traffic on ecommerce websites for Black Friday and the week as a whole were directly generated by social media sites. To put that another way, only 1% of orders on shopping sites came from people who visited a social network immediately before.
That number, which is based on IBM tracking transactions across 800 U.S. retail websites, didn't improve much from the previous year. Black Friday online sales hit another record this year, according to the latest data from IBM, but social media played a relatively small role — at least when measured directly.
"I would essentially describe it as being flat year-over-year, no dramatic change," Jay Henderson, strategy director at IBM Smarter Commerce, told Mashable in a recent interview. While these findings may frustrate some marketers who poured resources into social media campaigns, Henderson is quick to note that

social networks do have a "huge indirect influence" on shopping decisions by building brand and product awareness

social networks do have a "huge indirect influence" on shopping decisions by building brand and product awareness. "Social doesn't have the ability so far to drive traffic or sales directly to the site," he says. "It tends to have more of an indirect influence on purchases."
Shoppers may not go straight from seeing a product on Facebook or Pinterest to buying it on an ecommerce site, but rather stop off at a few other websites in between before finally making a purchase. The trick is figuring out how to measure how much influence engaging with a product or brand originally on one of those social networks had in the eventual purchase.
Adobe Digital Index, for example, found that there were more conversations on social media about "Black Friday" than "Thanksgiving Day." Amazon was the most referenced retailer for the two-day period with 450,000 posts, followed by Walmart with 300,000 posts.
Socialbakers, a service that tracks social media analytics, found that ShoeDazzle and Macy's had the most brand interactions on Facebook on Black Friday while Walmart attracted the most new Facebook fans.
While this data shows brand awareness on social media during the peak shopping week, it doesn't prove that these mobile and Internet-powered mentions resulted in any direct sales.
IBM tried to address this by analyzing the indirect influence on holiday shopping orders from two of the biggest social networks, Facebook and Pinterest. Shoppers referred from Facebook were found to have an average order value of $52.10, while shoppers referred from Pinterest had a much higher average order value of $92.51. Facebook, however, was found to convert sales at nearly four times the rate of Pinterest, which Henderson credits to Facebook having more sophisticated ad tools.
IBM hopes to capture the connection between someone browsing shirts on Pinterest and then buying some of those shirts later in the day. It's not an exact science — some other material could have influenced that person in the interim — but it's at least a start.
"Our ability to attribute success to the influence of social media will improve over time," Henderson says. "As long as you can show the influence that social media is having on the eventual purchase, that should be more than enough too justify the investment that marketers are making in those channels."