Wal-Mart: 194 social media mentions a minute Black Friday weekend

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.

Also: Walmart leverages Facebook to promote local stores

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.