With Christmas on the horizon, Amy Rountree from Maybe* takes a look at the tone and sentiment of the social media conversation about gift shopping.

Maybe* listened to the online conversation about gifting and present buying across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to discover which platform drove the most engagement and which platform delivered the most positive sentiment during September 2019.

Using social listening tools

The insight social media monitoring gives you helps:

• Identify positive conversation topics you can engage with.
• Benchmark yourself against your competitors.
• Improve your own content

How do people feel about gift shopping?

During September there were 10,787 conversations about gifting and presents across social media from 1 - 30 September 2019. 

10,568 of these conversations took place on Instagram, earning over 54,000 engagements. This means Instagram is likely the best place to put your gifting ideas and inspiration.

Our social media sentiment analysis revealed that only 5% of the conversations on Instragram score for positivity. That’s not to say that 95% of it is negative, far from it. In fact, the vast majority of the content that’s been Instagrammed is neutral. The overall picture shows that the gifting conversation is 50% positive.

This neutrality is largely impacted by the number of hashtags used. In fact, when we previously looked at what online gifting retailers have to say,we found that their posts were lacking in personality. So, if you’ve got something to say about gifting make your language positive and upbeat - after all, getting a gift is an exciting, lovely, or even a comical time.

Key takeaway

Remember that when it comes to the gifting conversation, personality equals positivity. Sentiment analysis gets to the core of a good social media strategy. It empowers you to create more of what makes people feel good about your brand.