Black Friday Moves Beyond Borders

Social listening reveals Brazil’s Black Friday boom

With Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year, just around the corner, our research team wanted to look at the conversational lead-up to the shopping holiday. Our analysis found the typical lead-up as shoppers and businesses begin posting about the holiday. Because our search query was in English, you'd expect that most of our results came from English-speaking countries. However, in our research, 27% of Black Friday-related conversations occurred in Portuguese. This high percentage keyed us into an emerging trend - Black Friday-related commerce in Brazil. We'll now review our findings to teach you how to use a social listening tool to make discoveries for changing interests in your business.

An initial look at post volume

Like many of our analyses, we first looked at post volume to understand the overall growth. We see an expected pattern we wrote about a few weeks ago in our Halloween brief: in anticipation of a predictable event like a holiday, post-volume rises in anticipation. As for Halloween, post volume looks flat until late October/early November as people start discussing the day of shopping. From there, we see sharp growth, increasing until the holiday.

You'll see an interesting periodic pattern that didn't happen with Halloween-related conversation but is taking place within Black Friday conversation: peaks around weekdays with troughs during weekends. Because this doesn't reflect a typical post volume pattern, it suggests that this doesn't look like a regular organic conversation. We'll dive next into Themes to confirm or disprove our suspicion.

Figure 1: 2023 Black Friday post volume (August 13, 2023 through November 13, 2023); Infegy data.

High promotional content

Next, we'll take a look at Themes to confirm our suspicion. Immediately, we see a massive concentration of promotional and discount-related content. This high distribution makes a ton of sense, as Black Friday's entire premise is to provide weighty discounts to shoppers to entice them to spend money at their stores and online. Due to the periodic nature that we discussed above and a high concentration of promotion, we can conclude that these are mostly business accounts discussing the upcoming Black Friday festivities instead of a more traditional organic audience that we typically discuss during these briefs.

Figure 2: Themes attributed to Black Friday conversation (August 13, 2023 through November 13, 2023); Infegy data.

Let's turn to source bios to understand this promotional conversation better. We see a ton of business-related keywords. These don't appear to be organic, which suggests that, on aggregate, shoppers themselves don't seem to be talking much about Black Friday this early in the season.

While shoppers aren't talking about Black Friday, we notice a high proportion of Portuguese-language within our source bios. "Loja" is the Portuguese word for "store," “Compre” is the word for “buy” in Portuguese. Finally, "Moda" is the Portuguese word for Fashion. This high preponderance of Portuguese appears unique for an English-language query like we started.

Figure 3: Source bios colored by category for Black Friday-related conversation (August 13, 2023 through November 13, 2023); Infegy data.

High concentration of Portuguese conversation

To quantify our qualitative findings from the source bios, we'll look at Infegy Atlas's language distribution. We use machine learning models to classify and categorize different social media users' languages when writing posts. Here, Portuguese makes up 27% of the overall conversation. That's astoundingly high for an English-language search.

Figure 4: 2023 Black Friday language distribution (August 13, 2023 through November 13, 2023); Infegy data.

To make sure this distribution makes sense, we'll quickly confirm it by switching to Infegy Atlas's Geography Tab. Here, we see Brazil has just as high a Score as the United States. Portuguese is the official language of Brazil, so we've confirmed the overall distribution we mentioned above.

Figure 5: 2023 Black Friday geographical distribution (August 13, 2023 through November 13, 2023); Infegy data.

Brazilian Black Friday revenue per year

We did some traditional research to see whether our finding around Brazilian Black Friday was a data collection quirk or rooted in fact. We quickly found that Black Friday has blown up in Brazil starting in 2010 and has quickly become the most popular shopping holiday in the entire year. Revenue followed with this popularity, quadrupling since 2013 to 3.2 billion Reals. Interestingly, media reports have shown that sales and conversations around Black Friday have moved earlier every year in Brazil. Our social listening data corroborates that finding.

Figure 6: Value of sales in Brazilian Reals in Billions of Black Fridays 2013 - 2022.; Data sourced from Statista.

Takeaways for your brand

Our social listening analysis has uncovered a significant trend in the lead-up to Black Friday. The surge in Black Friday-related conversations in Portuguese, particularly centered around promotional content, indicates a thriving commerce environment in Brazil. This data is crucial for businesses aiming to capitalize on international markets, especially considering Brazil's escalating Black Friday revenue over the years. Social listening not only unveils emerging trends but also provides valuable insights into consumer behavior and preferences. In the ever-evolving landscape of global commerce, harnessing the power of social listening is imperative for staying ahead of the curve and strategically positioning your brand for understanding international markets’ success.