Twitter lights up with e-commerce conversations this festive season

Friday, 6 November 2015

As Diwali approaches, e-commerce brands are using social listening to drive brand engagement. Brands already leverage consumer behavioral analytics to help design targeted marketing campaigns, but now brands are using social media platforms — such as Twitter — to gather in-depth analysis of buying behaviour and shopping patterns.

By tapping into “social listening” or online conversations, brands gain powerful insights to develop a focused marketing campaign and see higher sales conversions. Twitter has seen a rise in shopping, gifting, and e-commerce organic conversations, and brands are now in a position of power to influence consumer behavior, instead of depending on user analysis. They are driving the need to shop, reason to shop, and giving ample benefits such as discounts and deals to drive sales.

Social retail is the key to success this festive season and e-commerce brands have left no stone unturned to engage and cultivate active shoppers.

Consider this retail e-commerce study conducted by Twitter India from May 2014 to April 2015:

There have been 6.4M Tweets about e-commerce in the past 12 months.

Twitter lights up with e-commerce conversations this festive season

Source: Crimson Hexagon (May 2014 - April 2015)

Daily e-commerce conversations have seen an upward trend in the past 12 months; and deals and contests are key drivers in these conversations.

Twitter lights up with e-commerce conversations this festive season

Source: Crimson Hexagon (May 2014 - April 2015)

Leading e-commerce brands include (ranking):

  1. @snapdeal
  2. @myntra
  3. @flipkart

This festive season, e-commerce brands have deployed “human-to-human” marketing campaigns and used conversational hashtags to engage the user.

@amazonIN’s #TryForGold contest threw up entertaining conversations amongst users.

They have also recognised the importance of native video and other video tools such as Periscope to engage with the user. The autoplay function now ensures that videos play automatically on Twitter, which is an advantage for brands. This particular feature has ensured additional engagement rates — for example Nestle’s corporate commercial saw 20% click through rates.

Trigger-Search-Interest-Purchase is the strategy the brands are using this festive season, and they are making social media an exciting way to discover new brands, share experiences, reviews, photos, videos, and talk about preferences while shopping this Diwali.

So, shop with Twitter this festive season!