Memorial Day is principally about remembering the sacrifice of those who fought for their country, but in recent years it has evolved into much more than that. We looked at the data to determine what works on social for the holiday.
Memorial Day, beyond its traditional meaning of honoring service men and women, is a huge day for brands, with retail performance on the day famous across the country. Our latest report covers how these brands perform on social media, and what content is being produced for the holiday.
According to data from the AAA, travelers alone were projected to spend $12 billion while away from home in 2016, and that is to say nothing of the sales going on in the retail world.
WalletHub data from 2017 suggests that 41.4 percent of consumers intended to take advantage of Memorial Day Sales, with retailers offering discounts of up to 90 percent.
In the cooking department, Nielsen has it that beef alone will contribute to nearly $800 million in sales as people get their grill going for the unofficial start of the summer.
Needless to say, then, there are a number of opportunities for brands and publishers to insert themselves into the conversation, and we will show how they do that.
Top Memorial Day content
The top stories of the holiday tended to be to do with the origin of the day as a day of remembrance, with that theme, alongside politically charged stories from both sides of the spectrum making up many of the top stories.
Fox News was the top publisher of the period with nearly 450,000 engagements, more than double any other publisher for Memorial Day content.
Memorial Day sales posts
A big part of Memorial Day beyond the honoring of the troops is the traditional Memorial Day sales, which are some of the biggest retail cutbacks outside of Black Friday.
Web content for Memorial Day sales had one clear front-runner, with dontwasteyourmoney.com ahead of the pack by some 3x.
In terms of companies featured in the content, JCPenney, Lowe’s, and Home Depot all featured heavily, with JCPenney having the most widely engaged story in terms of earned media.
For Facebook, the story was extremely different, with the brands themselves driving most of the engagement. Fashion and beauty brands did particularly well, with seven of the top ten posts coming from that vertical.
Interestingly, two ‘celebrity pet’ accounts, Lil Bub, and Nala the cat were two of the top ten posts for Memorial Day sales, with merchandise relating to their personal brands.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. For more Memorial Day social media insights, including content and format analysis download the full report here.
