Posts Tagged ‘Instagram’

 

2012 Holiday Season: Record Breaking Online Activity (Already)

Monday, November 26th, 2012

The term “Cyber Monday” made it’s debut in November of 2005, ushering in a new era of online marketing, promotions and early-bird specials. Six years later, it seems Cyber-Monday is trumping Black Friday, but not just in the area of online sales. A multitude of records have already been broken during the start of this year’s holiday season.

Staggering Stats

The National Retail Federation reported in a press release that “a record 247 million shoppers visited stores and websites over Black Friday weekend, up from 226 million last year. Making sure to take advantage of retailers’ promotions to the full extent, the average holiday shopper spent $423 this weekend, up from $398 last year. Total spending reached an estimated $59.1 billion.”

Forbes listed the top five most-visited online retailers on Black Friday (with auctions sites excluded from the rankings) as follows:

1. Amazon

2. Walmart

3. Best Buy

4. Target

5. Apple

Forbes also offers a Cyber Monday cheat sheet for bargain hunters who will, no doubt, help shatter the previous online sales record of  $1.25 billion dollars (up 22% from Cyber Monday 2010). More on that here. 

Instagram’s Busiest Day

Photos of beautifully brined and browned turkeys exploded on Instagram this past Thursday.

From the Instagram blog: “Over 10 million photos that mentioned Thanksgiving-themed words in their captions were shared yesterday. For several hours throughout the day, more than 200 photos about Thanksgiving were posted every second.”

“Overall, the day broke all Instagram records as we saw the number of shared photos more than double from the day before, making it our busiest day so far.”

Cyber Monday Mania

As noted above, 2011 brought sales over over $1.25 billion with a 22% increase from the year prior.

With consumer confidence increasing as well as Zillow posting home values had their biggest monthly jump in value in seven years, we may see a the perfect storm for spending this year.

 

 

 

 

Social Media is Becoming More Visual

Monday, September 26th, 2011

This past week, Facebook unveiled its new Timeline, which will replace the traditional profile page that we’re all used to.  If you’re wondering why you haven’t seen the change on your own profile, it’s because Facebook is rolling out the new feature slowly.  So far, only Facebook Developers are able to make the change.  However, thanks to a tip from our friends at Mashable, anyone is capable of taking the new layout for a test drive.

If you frequently share images, one of the first things you’ll notice about the latest feature is that they are much more pronounced.  The current version of the profile that is being replaced was much more text oriented.  Images were merely icons, which meant an extra click of the mouse if you wanted to see it in more detail.

Mark Zuckerberg‘s intention with the layout change was to create an emotional experience as you look back on someone’s life through Facebook.  Knowing that, it’s no surprise that larger images were used to create that effect.  A single picture can illicit that emotional experience in a way that would take a thousand words to describe.  It’s now much easier to see a child grow over the years, watch someone make an amazing physical transformation, or remember all the amazing destinations you’ve travelled to.

When Facebook makes a change to what will grab a user’s attention the most, the ripple effect can be profound.  For instance, it won’t be surprising to see apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic grow even more popular than they already are.

Additionally, we already know that the most successful Tumblr posts are typically images with a small amount of text, so that leaves us wondering if Twitter will make a change to put more of an emphasis on images, as well.  If the rest of the social web begins to move toward a largely image focused way of sharing, it would be interesting to see if they incorporate them into their platform.

So tell us, do you think we are moving toward a more image based social web?  Why or why not?