People plan to spend a record amount of money on Halloween this year, but how much will Facebook contribute to this?
The average U.S. adult will spend $72 preparing for Halloween, together adding up to $6.86 billion in total Halloween spending, according to the National Retail Federation.
Some 161 million people in the U.S. plan to celebrate the holiday, says NRF. But none of this directly translates into Facebook commerce just yet.
Much more likely: people may show more openness to marketing messages invoking the holiday on the social network.
We fully expect to see spammers and malware purveyors try to capitalize on people’s interest in Halloween, and hope people think before they click on links; even though Facebook’s security is now likelier than ever to catch any such n’er-do-wells red-handed, people can never be too vigilant.
Meanwhile, the early signs of Halloween’s potential for Facebook continue to come in.
An application called Halloween Treats ranks as the fourth-fastest growing on Facebook this week, based on a 284,400 gain in monthly active users — largely because the app requires that you invite friends before you can use it. t
A Facebook fan page simply called Halloween has just over one million likes as of this writing; the newest metric available to pages shows that 3,433 people “are talking about this.”
Another dozen or so community pages address the holiday as well.
A couple of costume pages have some significant followings, although without any commerce actually taking place on Facebook.
Most notable among them, the seasonal retail chain Spirit Halloween has 579,229 likes, and 126,143 “talking about this.” The page touts a daily contest that appears to be driving up the fan count.
A page called Halloween Costumes, with 114,587 likes, promotes CostumeStore.com.
In another vein altogether, one retail brand added a rather quirky Halloween shopping tab from Vitrue: Svedka Vodka’s Facebook page claims that robot-costumed waitresses are handing out coupons for discounts on said outfit.
We can only expect that more examples of Halloween commerce might show up on Facebook as the holiday approaches.
Readers, what kind of Halloween content do you see on Facebook that makes you want to click?
Source: All Facebook
Friday, October 14, 2011