• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, December 1, 2014

I don’t even know what to call this new and longer ramp-up to the holiday shopping frenzy anymore. Black Friday is outdated now that Thanksgiving is diluting that traditional event. Add Cyber Monday to the mix and the long preview and early sales almost everyone was touting this year and you just have a big blob on the calendar hardly worth nailing down. But for what it is worth, Black Friday still seems to be the height of the orgiastic activity that kicks off the holiday shopping season. And according to social media agency Spredfast, this year blew the doors off previous levels of chatter and promotion on Twitter.

In its monitoring of the Twitter channel on Black Friday, Spredfast reports more than double the number of conversations around the holiday shopping events -- from 996,306 in 2013 to 2,013,943 this year. The brands that came up most often in conversation were Kohl’s, Apple, Samsung, Amazon and Microsoft.

A number of retailers were working the channel hard. Kohl’s earned its notoriety on Twitter this holiday with a trivia contest that stretched across more than 40 queries made to followers. The trivia ranged from the obviously self-serving promotions (“Which stand mixer is our top Black Friday deal”) to genuine holiday song trivia. Respondents were entered into $500 gift card sweepstakes.

Best Buy got a good response to its @HintingSeason hashtag campaign, which invited gift-getters an opportunity to post hints for their desires. In some cases other manufacturers, including Nissan, posted their wares into the hashtag. Best Buy itself responded to a number of tweets by bringing the hinted goods to the Tweeter’s house and posting the video.

Amazon lured over 10,000 people to use the @UnwrapKindle hashtag to unlock savings. Macy’s used the Twitter feed to advertise deals, with images from the Thanksgiving Day Parade, but also to push its followers over to its Black Friday posts on Snapchat.

The Twitter campaigns clearly were hitting an important target, according to the demographics that Spredfast recorded. The plurality of the audience -- 36% -- was in the 24-34 age range, followed by 25% who were 35-44. But if you add in the 18-24 segment, fully 51% of Twitter chatter about holiday shopping on Friday was from the Millennials.