Walmart Takes Over Facebook for 72 Hours
By Brad Tuttle
Throughout the 2012 holiday season, Walmart is running a staggering two billion ads on Facebook. Some 50 million Walmart ads popped up on Black Friday weekend alone, when the world’s largest retailer shut out the competition and bought up all the Facebook ad space available in advance. Given the comprehensiveness of the campaign, you’d think there was some proof that blanketing Facebook with ads yields stronger sales, right?
Interestingly enough, no, there’s not much proof out there that this is the case.
A recent Wall Street Journal piece shed light on how the biggest-ever, specially-designed mobile ad campaign on Facebook took place over Black Friday weekend, when Walmart monopolized the social-media site with a whopping 50 million ads during a 72-hour period. The campaign was in the works for months prior to launch and went live during what is arguably the year’s most popular and frenzied shopping weekend.
So did the campaign work? On one hand, Walmart marketing chief Stephen Quinn told the WSJ that he “never saw this level of engagement” coming as a result of any other digital ad initiative. On the other, it’s unclear whether the campaign yielded stronger sales. In this case, “engagement” is gauged by things like how the ads attracted over 100,000 comments from people who presumably saw the ads. But many of those comments came from consumers who were “engaged” only to the point that they were compelled to complain about unwanted ads popping up on their mobile news feeds.
Thus far, there isn’t much indicating that social media ads lead to sales for retailers. So why would a retailer such as Walmart bother buying into a strategy that’s so unproven, especially on the grand scale seen over Black Friday weekend?
What we know for sure is that retailers feel like they have to create a strong social media presence. Analysts and stores talk frequently about how they must reach shoppers at every “touchpoint” (brick and mortar, mobile, tablets, PC screens, etc.), and clearly, it’s necessary to use social media to hit several of these points. In a Deloitte survey, nearly half (48%) of consumers said they expected to use social media to help them make decisions regarding holiday shopping—researching ideas, gathering info about discounts, and so on. When a survey from BDO asked retailer chief marketing executives how they’d be promoting their holiday campaigns, 99% said they’d be using Facebook. The experts at Adobe Digital Marketing, meanwhile, have predicted that social media referrals to retail sites would double this holiday season, compared to that of 2011.
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