Social Sites Help eCommerce

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Social Sites Help ECommerce...

By: Jordan McCollum
2009-12-04

... (and Your Annual Reality Check) The results are in: Cyber Monday (and Black Friday) = success! The numbers are actually up from last year...

...despite the state the economy is still in. And according to Hitwise, social sites helped to drive sales. (Yeah, FOR REAL.)

Their data shows that not only was US traffic up to social sites over the holiday weekend, but downstream traffic to online retailers was also up -- especially to Amazon (Cyber Monday winner), Wal-Mart (Black Friday winner), Target, Best Buy and Toys R Us. Wal-Mart also saw the highest increase in downstream traffic from Twitter (among the Retail 500 that Hitwise tracks).

However, let me just pull out my favorite wet blanket -- sort of. Lets see, how can I put this? #1"Cyber Monday is a made-up holiday. Nobody outside of Internet marketing/retailing has ever heard of it and it has nothing to do with their shopping patterns. However, theres good news here, too. We are a nation (world?) of procrastinators --and another day is actually the biggest (revenue-wise) online shopping day of the year -- and its yet to come.

The thinking behind Cyber Monday, created in 2005, was that workers returning from their Thanksgiving holiday would use the Internet to do a lot of their holiday shopping. (At work? Dont they have the Internet at home, where they have all those glossy ads from stores to compare prices? Were they too lazy/agoraphobic to go out on Black Friday? (Hey, no worries, me too.) Clearly, the logic behind this holiday was always flawed.)

Two years ago, it was Green Monday (although now there seems to be some confusion as to whether that label applies to the first or second Monday in December) -- with $881M in online sales (versus $733 on Cyber Monday, tied for tenth among the big online sales days in 2007). Last year, it was the day after Green Monday, with $887M (versus $846M on Cyber Monday) -- but with this years Cyber Monday total the same as last years highest sales day (and last years highest sales day only a 1% increase over the year before), could we hope for anything higher?

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About the Author:
Jordan McCollum is a staff writer for the popular marketing blog Marketing Pilgrim. She has worked in search engine optimization with clients including 3M, Little Giant Ladders and ADP. After graduating from Brigham Young University, Jordan joined the SEO copywriting team at the Internet marketing firm 10x Marketing. After 10x closed its doors in December 2006, Jordan became a freelance writer and Internet marketing consultant specializing in SEO. She also has extensive experience with web analytics, conversion rate enhancement and e-mail marketing.


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