Back In Black Friday?

For those of you in the U.S., I hope you had yourselves a very happy (and long) Thanksgiving weekend.

They’re never long enough.

So did anybody out there go and do a little shopping?

It seems that quite a few of you certainly went shopping online.

Me, I beat the rush, heading over to Amazon on Thanksgiving Day to buy a couple of new photography toys.

But it was Black Friday, as we’ve come to coin the shopping day after Thanksgiving, where things really heated up.

comScore just released its numbers overnight, and indicated that Black Friday reached $595M U.S. in U.S. online holiday spending, up 11 percent over last year.

For the first 27 days of November, $10.57B had been spent online, a 3 percent increase over the corresponding days last year.

For Black Friday deal seekers, it was clear the discount shoppers were out in force, with the number of visitors to coupon sites growing 17 percent over last year, at 3.3M visitors.

And it was ShopLocal.com which ranked as the most visited comparison shopping site on Black Friday (2M visitors on Friday), helping turn local Web inquiries into local “brick and mortar” sales.

Now for the drumroll….the five top online retail properties surpassed four million U.S. unique visitors on Black Friday, with Amazon garnering a 28 percent increase unique visitors over last year, followed by Walmart (22 percent), Apple.com (39 percent), Target (2 percent), and BestBuy (24 percent).

Overall, a strong start to the holiday shopping season, but as they ask on Broadway, does it have legs?

Larry Dignan over at ZDNet cites discounts and promotions as having led to the early pop, and it’s clear that the Amazon v. Walmart match is proving to be the event of this holiday season.

Of course, it’s way too soon to tell who has been naughty, nice, or profitable, and who’s simply giving away the online store to get customers in and spending.

Santa still has plenty of rounds to make, including today’s round of “Cyber Monday,” when we worker bees head back to the office corporate networks to shop during our lunch break.

But the early holiday online shopping signs at least offer some hope that the kiddies will get more than charcoal this year.

Traffic Patterns

TechCrunch posted about the Twitter/Facebook horse race, which seems to me isn’t much of one these days.

In terms of activity, Twitter is staring into Facebook’s rearview mirror.

The September comScore data revealed that Facebook had grown by over 3M unique visitors in September, as Twitter flatlined.

The gap between the two is now 75M uniques (in the U.S.), although TechCrunch does acknowledge many folks (including me) use Twitter clients, so perhaps those numbers aren’t an exact reflection of the usage.

So perhaps they should be counting calls to the API instead?

Me, I’ve noticed a dwindling in my own Twitter behavior.  I use it mainly to highlight my blog posts, and when I travel.

I roam, therefore I Tweet.

But I’ve not been traveling much of late, and I’m too damned busy to sit around and Tweet all day when I’m stuck in front of the computer on the home front.

So instead, I use TweetDeck more now as a monitoring tool to keep an eye on what others are saying/posting…but even then, the firehose is now too voluminous to consume it all.

Which leads back to a post I wrote a couple of years ago (if I can find it, I’ll come back and add a link to it) about the need for metafilters in the information overload age.

As for Facebook, I find it’s a much better tool for staying in touch with people on a personal basis, so I’m probably spending more time there using it as a basic communications tools, and saving my Tweets for more work related matters.

Although because I have the Facebook Twitter update on, all my work related posts get face to Facebook.

C’est la vie.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to all that work I was talking about earlier.

It’s fall plan time, a special kind of hell around these parts.