GOSF 2014 Becomes a Battleground for E-commerce Brands on Social Media

2013 was not exactly a rosy year for GOSF 2013. While the buzz was high around the 3-day shopping extravaganza, regular glitches made people vent out against it on social media channels. But it was certainly better than 2012, which was indeed a big letdown.

This year, Google seems to be doing something right, at least, from what we’ve seen till now.

While there isn’t much offline buzz about the GOSF 2014, social media channels are going crazy with Google India going out all guns blazing in the last 2 weeks.

The buzz is primarily led by Twitter, with some sparse efforts on YouTube and Facebook.

The Buzz Is All on Twitter

If you are a Twitter user, then you have to be living under a rock to not notice the #WinGOSF14 campaign - the 14 day long shopping contest by Google India. By partnering with 14 good brands, the #WinGOSF14 has kept the trending charts on Twitter busy with more than 118k Tweets since Nov 25^th – when the campaign was kicked off with Asian Paints as the first brand to run the contest.

The hashtag saw maximum tweets (27565 tweets) on the 30^th November when it was AskMe’s turn to run the #WinGOSF14 contest.

Apart from #WinGOSF14, Google is also trying to build around the hashtags #GOSF2014 and #72HoursOfCrazy.

While GOSF2014 has seen a good response (more than 6600 tweets), 72HoursOfCrazy is yet to catch up with Twitter users. Incidentally, Google has only just started building buzz around #72HoursOfCrazy and it is going to last throughout the 3-day event.

Updated no. of tweets for #72HoursOfCrazy: 6410

Meanwhile on YouTube and Facebook…

Surprisingly, Google isn’t making much buzz on Facebook. The world’s biggest social networking platform has always been the most used channel for e-commerce brands to drive traffic/sales, which is why it is surprising to see that Google India is not doing any activity on Facebook around India’s largest e-commerce festival.

Even on YouTube, except for one ad video, Google doesn’t seem to be doing much. The ad video, which was published on Nov 27^th, has clocked more than 2.35m views but the engagement on it has been very small. This, in turn, hints at the fact that most of the view clocked were via ads.

Organically, there hasn’t been much buzz on these platforms unlike Twitter – where it is a rage!

Competition

This year Flipkart is not a part of GOSF, however. After a good Big Billion Day sale, Flipkart is trying to get people talking about the #BigAppShoppingDays which runs in parallel to the GOSF..

Its choice to break away from GOSF this year is not a very good sign as it has been integral to GOSF in the last two years, and possess the potential to steal the thunder away from Google.

As to how GOSF will pan out in the next 3 days, only time will tell; but it’s going to be a great watch for those in the e-commerce to see how these brands battle it out to garner the maximum social media buzz.