Now that the new year is right around the corner, it's time to start weighing in on the $655.8 billion dollar question: Which companies won the 2016 holiday shopping season?
In attempting to answer this question, a good place to start is Facebook.
Facebook owns a staggering 31.2% of total U.S. display ad spend, making it clear that the social media giant was a primary focus for consumer marketers this holiday season in attracting and engaging shoppers. But since Facebook's News Feed algorithm is optimized to display content from friends and family above ads, the companies most effective in leveraging Facebook were the ones that successfully encouraged their fans to write posts about them and share their branded content.
With this in mind, we analyzed the Facebook Pages for eleven of this holiday season's most popular companies during the busiest shopping period of the year - Black Friday (11/25) through Super Saturday (12/17). For six retailers and five consumer goods brands, we tallied the total number of Facebook fans, compared the number of brand posts versus fan comments, and calculated which company was able to drive the most engagement on Facebook.
And while none of these retailers have released their year end revenue numbers yet, if social media is any indicator, Target had a very successful holiday season.