Holiday Analytics – Why Retail Should be Checking

TAKE NOTE (Insights into SAP solutions and Emerging Technology)

Santa Claus has it easy. Sure, the jolly man in red must create and deliver presents to children across the globe. But he already knows exactly what each kid wants, and even has a month or two to deliver. Those are huge advantages. Unlike Saint Nick, retailers don’t have consumers excitedly mailing in their holiday wish lists. It takes work to understand what they want and why they want it.

Social media has those answers, through which consumers share their thoughts and feelings about almost everything. In today’s hyper-connected society, social sentiment about products and trends can be as impactful as big-budget marketing campaigns.   Analytics solutions, like those from SAP, collect that wealth of information and distill it into easy-to-understand insights that retailers can use to fuel informed decisions.

SAP has created a dynamic dashboard that combs social media conversations to reveal consumers’ top categories and interests of the holiday season – from home improvement and electronics to jewelry and toys and games. Using the power of SAP social media analytics, you can not only gain understanding into what product categories people are talking about, but how they feel about them. It’s this combination that gives you truly actionable insights about retail/holiday shopping trends.

The live dashboard enables both consumers and businesses to track these trends as they are happening. Updated hourly, it continually measures key social analytics to provide insights into:

Which product categories are popular?
Identify trends and discover what’s being talked about most based on the volume of mentions each category receives.

Which factors and themes are most important this holiday season?
Understand what people value most about each category, in regards to time, customer service, price and convenience.

Online or in-store?
See whether consumers are looking to purchase products online or inside a brick-and- mortar store.

Answering these questions helps get to the real benefits that social media analytics provide. When retailers are able to actively listen and understand social conversations, they can make better-informed decisions about their entire business strategy.

With the data updated in real time, be sure to check back often to see how the conversations shift throughout the holiday. Click through to see the live social sentiment analysis dashboard now.

This story originally appeared on The Customer Edge.