Wal-Mart was mentioned on social media outlets 3.2 times a second during Black Friday weekend. That sum amounts to 194 times per minute in social media.
Now that's social media at scale.
Wal-Mart's Duncan MacNaughton, chief merchandising officer at the retail giant, divulged those statistics at the Credit Suisse annual consumer conference on Thursday.
MacNaughton also noted that Wal-Mart had more than 39 million impressions on Facebook as well as 10.7 million fans. That's good for the No. 1 retailer on Facebook. For what it's worth, Amazon has 2,065,360 fans and Target has 7,401,086 fans.
Following Wal-Mart presentations is usually interesting from a business and tech perspective. On the business side, Wal-Mart is a great indicator on the U.S. economy and how it's doing. On the tech side, all of these stats Wal-Mart churns out are all the result of some information system. Wal-Mart is an analytics emporium.
Here are a few stats data nuggets from Wal-Mart's talk that lead to the bottom line.
The U.S. consumer is cashing checks electronically and going through the checkout line shortly after.
Wal-Mart said there was 4 percent food inflation in the third quarter and 70 basis points of that was passed onto consumers.
On-shelf availability---a metric that tracks whether a consumer could buy a good if he wanted to---was 93 percent over Black Friday.
Twenty six percent of all turkeys sold over the Black Friday weekend had a disposable aluminum foil pans in the shopping cart too.
Wal-Mart processed 700 register transactions and more than 4,000 items per second during the first two hours of Black Friday.
The retailer sold 1.8 million towels on Black Friday, 1.8 million dolls and more than 250,000 bicycles.
On the ad front, Wal-Mart bought 279 million impressions on Yahoo, MSN and AOL home pages.