The holidays have passed and the shopping rush is over. So which department store won the holiday race? We’re not concerned with which store’s cash registers are overflowing; we’d rather see who ruled social. Which is why we’ve put two luxury, specialty-retail department stores Nordstrom and Lord & Taylor head-to-head in this week’s Social Media Face Off.
In order to compare the brands in social media, we set up search streams for each in the uberVU platform, including variations in spelling (e.g. “lord & taylor” and “lord and taylor”) and the Twitter handles for each brand. We’ve compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.
Let’s see which retailer cashed in this season in social.
Round One: Mentions
Nordstrom dominates round one with 49,462 mentions, easily topping the 4,868 mentions of Lord & Taylor. That’s more than 10 times as many mentions!
Winner: Nordstrom
Round Two: Sentiment
Let’s see how the luxury retailers measure up when it comes to the sentiment behind the mentions. Both brands have quality positivity scores with 33% of Lord & Taylor’s mentions and 37% of Nordstrom’s registering as positive. Lord & Taylor did have the lower percentage of negative mentions with 9% compared to Nordstrom’s 10%. But as always with sentiment, positivity wins.
Winner: Nordstrom
Round Three: Conversation Mapping
It’s not looking good for Lord & Taylor heading into round three. Let’s see if the retailer’s conversation map can earn a win. By comparing the conversation maps for each brand we can see what topics earned traction in social and find out which brand had the best buzz.
“Christmas”, “holiday”, “shopping” and “gift” appeared on both maps clearly echoing the recent holiday shopping season. Lord & Taylor is also getting attention for promotions like its holiday-themed storefront “windows” and its “friends” and “family” sale. An interesting topic that appeared twice is “paging sponsorships department.” Looks like the social web was having fun with a recent sighting of singer-songwriters Lorde and Taylor Swift.
Paging @LordandTaylor sponsorships department. #Sorry #CouldntResist pic.twitter.com/mk9lIIxrYk
— Bill Werde (@bwerde) December 13, 2013
Nordstrom is also getting attention for a tweet with “you’re an all-star,” but that tweet was posted by the brand. Nordstrom is clearly well received in social with “happy”, “love” and “great” all ranking on its conversation map. While we’re impressed with the brand recognition of each retailer, it looks like social is giving more love to Nordstrom.
You’re an all-star. @Converse http://t.co/xIuQ31tDvM pic.twitter.com/oKB4j6fg2g — Nordstrom (@Nordstrom) December 15, 2013
Winner: Nordstrom
Overall Winner: Nordstrom
It’s a clean sweep for Nordstrom! With wins in mentions, sentiment and conversation mapping we declare the winner of this Social Media Face Off to be Nordstrom. Nice social!
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