Member Article

Focus on safety, sales & steady engagement for back-to-school retail

Back-to-school shopping usually marks the end of summer for students, and the start of a busy season for retailers. Back-to-school this year, however, will inevitably look a little different.

To understand how consumer behaviours have changed in the COVID-19 era, the trends taking shape around back-to-school 2020 and how retailers can prepare for it, new research from Sprout Social turns to social data.

In the first six months of 2020, there have been more than 657K social messages about the topic of going back-to-school - 40.3K of which have included the keyword “safe” or “safety” according to. As the return to school this year will likely look different compared to past years, retailers can use social data to better understand their customers as their needs continue to shift.

The research also shows that consumer engagement with retailers on social skyrocketed this year, with the average number of engagements retailers received on posts the same day they were published increased by 40% in Q2 2020 compared to Q2 2019.

Retailers saw a 72% increase in the average number of daily inbound messages in Q2 2020 compared to Q2 2019, while the volume of conversations related to retail is up. From January to mid-May this year, the conversation around retail within the context of COVID-19 generated over 6.1M social mentions across 2.6M unique authors.

The most engaging networks for retailers in the first half of 2020 included: o Instagram: 69 comments/replies per day o Facebook: 64 comments/replies per day o Twitter: 41 comments/replies per day

As consumers transition out of lockdown, they aren’t just looking for deals, they’re also looking for ways to make donations to schools, teachers and students struggling to afford school supplies. Message volume around keywords like “donate” or “donation” for back-to-school have already increased 5,770% in Q2 2020 compared to Q1 2020.

Unsurprisingly, consumers’ back-to-school lists look different compared to past year. This year, social listening data shows consumers are shopping for masks, hand sanitiser, thermometers and other safety and sanitation-focused products, while last year over the same period, consumers shopped for traditional supplies (backpack, notebooks, uniforms).

Safety is a major topic of discussion. The volume of messages that included the keyword “safe” or “safety” reached over 40.3K and garnered a total of 596.3K engagements between January 1 and June 30.

Concerns about COVID-19 are still top of mind for many consumers and there is a lot of uncertainty about whether students will even return to in-person schooling. But consumer engagement with retailers has surged in the first half of 2020, so businesses have an opportunity to reinvigorate consumer excitement about back-to-school shopping.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Sprout Social .