Google’s Great Online Shopping Festival 2014 (GOSF) was back for its third installment with more than 25 categories and 450 partners offering the best of products. Not surprisingly, considering the entire exercise has been online, it created a huge social media buzz.
In fact, the social media build up to this festival started from the first week of December with Google India participating with each brand to promote the festival on Twitter with exclusive contests.
Contrary to last year, when the official website was down due to technical snags, the festival started off steadily with more than 1.3K mentions right in the first hour. People started talking more about the fest as the day started off, with more than 132K posts across Facebook, Twitter and blogs almost the end.
Ashwin Mittal, President, Blueocean Market Intelligence said, “The social media buzz around the Great Online Shopping Festival 2014 started days before the actual festival opened. Since the day it opened, GOSF 2014 clocked more than 132,000 posts across Facebook, Twitter and blogs.
The hashtag #72HoursOfCrazy topped the chart with more than 39,000 mentions, followed by 10 other hashtags. Real Estate Brands also had a sizeable participation with Tata Homes & HDFC Realty being in the top 5 most associated brands in GOSF.”
People took to Twitter to share their experiences, more than any other platform, contributing more than 95% of overall conversations. #72HoursOfCrazy, being the official hashtag used by @GoogleIndia, was the top trend on Twitter, with more than 38K conversations by ecstatic users. The overall sentiment was positive, with an average of 16 positive comments for each rant.
Now, talking about the brands associated, total brand partners were around 90 in 2012, in 2013 they were 270 and the number has jumped to 450 for GOSF 2014.
While most of the big ecommerce players participated, Flipkart chose to stay away this year. @Snapdeal has been the top brand, being the most talked about brand so far.
Mittal added, “Most of the people on social media platforms mentioned Google India and Snapdeal several times. Most of the conversations were dominated by males by 69% and with a relatively younger audience of 25 – 34 age group. Metros had the most interested target group, with Mumbai & New Delhi having more than 50% participation on GOSF 2014. The reverberations across multiple social media platforms created lot of positive noise giving a thrust to all e-Commerce partners.”