Last week Groupon offered its first national deal, partnering with Gap to let users buy a $50 Gap store credit for $25. The Groupon was timed to the back-to-school season and sold 441,000 units for $11 million. Groupon has experienced great success selling local deals, but this partnership could lead to more larger, national partnerships.
In the last five months, Groupon expanded from one country to 29 countries, from 3 million subscribers to more than 15 million and from less than 300 employees to more than 1,500 employees. The addition of national brands could boost growth further.
We analyzed overall buzz on Groupon using Social Radar, and found that online chatter around Groupon has increased 800% since the beginning of 2010, and spiked significantly in the past three months.
Overall sentiment from May 1, 2010 through today is overwhelmingly positive at 88%.
A closer look at the sentiment trend in the past month shows generally very positive sentiment with one spike in negativity in late July.
The topic cloud for the past month shows only one negative word: Daily Deal.
We clicked on the spike in negative chatter to review some of the specific posts to find an article in TechCrunch on July 29 about the problem with the daily deal. The article provides an interview with CEO Andrew Mason discussing how the Groupon personalization system will give a user one deal a day based on their preferences, their purchase history and their profile. Although there will be several, simultaneous deals in any given area, a user will only be able to access one main deal from his/her account.
Comparatively speaking though, the negative chatter was miniscule.
Finally, we also decided to analyze where the content was being generated, and found that 80% is coming from microblogs.
This shows us sites like Twitter have been a big source of buzz for Groupon.
With Groupon increasing foot traffic at stores (deals are not valid online), sharing profit with its partners, and a a $1.35 billion valuation, Groupon is poised for further growth.
