Well, it's that time of year again. We’re heading into the holidays, and with it the busiest marketing and retail season of the year, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Customers will not only rush to stores and online retailers, but will also flood social media with conversations around the big shopping days.

The Marketing Cloud Social Studio team at Salesforce tracks these conversations and trends on social media around the big shopping weekend and for the last few years have shared them on this blog. This year, we'll include detailed shopping data from the insights team at the Commerce Cloud, including mobile sales and traffic, peak shopping times, free shipping volume, discount rates, and much more.

Heading into the big week we're already seeing some interesting trends. Each year the volume of conversation around holiday shopping has grown. Last year, the conversation was up over 20% from the previous year. Heading into this year, we're seeing continued growth, with early conversations up over 30% from 2015 and with no signs of slowing down. So far, almost 80% of all Black Friday social posts have positive sentiment. On the product front, so far this year the brands that are dominating the conversation are heavily weighted towards electronics, with Xbox capturing the largest share of conversation and Apple in second place.

Over the next week, we’ll look at the brands that people are talking about, what products are on shoppers wish lists and who is winning the online battle for consumers’ attention. In addition, the Commerce Cloud team will provide an analysis on which day won the battle for biggest shopping day - will it be Black Friday, Cyber Monday or, even, Thanksgiving?

We're tracking social conversation and shopping behavior using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio and Salesforce Commerce Cloud and will update the report below on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. We'll add the updates to the slides in this same post, so check back often!

Marketers use Social Studio to listen, analyze, publish and engage with their customers across social media. Social Studio tracks and analyzes social conversations across millions of online sources and offers marketers deep social insight on their brand, products and market. For more information on Social Studio click here.

Commerce Cloud empowers companies to unify the customer experience across all points of commerce, including web, social, mobile, store, and others. From shopping, to fulfillment, to customer service, Commerce Cloud delivers a 1-to-1 shopping experience with built-in predictive intelligence. Learn more about Commerce Cloud.