Adobe delivers social media’s verdict on Amazon Prime Day: Less ugh, more yay

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Amazon Prime Day cat
Cute kitten or Exploding Kittens on Amazon Prime Day? You decide. (Credit: Amazon via Twitter)

Amazon says its second annual Prime Day outdid the first one on the sales front – and although some Twitter users reported “Add to Cart” fails, the social-media metrics for Tuesday’s shopping extravaganza showed improvement as well.

At least that’s the verdict from Adobe Digital Insights, which cites figures that are at least as solid as Amazon’s sales report. The assessment is based on more than 4 million blips that were aggregated from blogs, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, Reddit, Foursquare and other sources in July 2015 and July 2016.

Here are five top takeaways:

  • 39 percent of overall sentiment around Amazon Prime Day was related to sadness, compared with 50 percent last year. Joyful expressions accounted for 30 percent of the total, compared with 23 percent in 2015. Other categories of social sentiment included 22 percent for admiration, and 9 percent for surprise. The main sources of social-media sadness were the issues that people encountered when they added items to their shopping cart and tried to check out, and the “odd deals” that started surfacing as the day wore on. Last year’s big sadness had to do with the perceived lack of blockbuster deals.
  • Amazon products such as Echo speakers and Kindle readers were among the top products receiving positive attention. So were 4K TV sets, Instant Pot pressure cookers, Google’s OnHub wireless routers and Microsoft Xbox One consoles and games.
Adobe Digital Insights on Amazon Prime Day 2016
This chart tracks mentions of #PrimeDay on selected social media Tuesday, hour by hour in Pacific Time. Total mentions exceeded 200,000 for the day, Adobe said. (Credit: Adobe Digital Insights)
  • California, New York, Texas, Florida and Washington were the top U.S. states buzzing about Prime Day. That’s similar to last year, when California and New York were the top talkers.
  • Mentions of Prime Day in Britain were up 44 percent, but the level of social buzz in the U.K. was still nowhere near what it was in the U.S.
  • Walmart was relatively buzz-free. Amazon’s retail rival ramped up some counterprogramming for Prime Day – for example, by offering five days of free shipping. But on social media, Walmart’s profile was “business as usual,” Adobe said.

As Adobe noted, much of Tuesday’s kvetching came from Prime Day fans who tried to put items in their shopping cart but discovered that they couldn’t check out. Sometimes the deal was gone by the time the issue was resolved. Well, at least some of the kvetchers had fun with it. Here are a few of the more entertaining tweets, positive and negative:

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