While certainly not equivalent to the melee associated with Black Friday shopping, which occurs on the Friday following the US Thanksgiving, there was still no shortage of Jedis, young and old, queued up waiting to be amongst the first to purchase "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" products, the next in a long series of movies with the aforementioned namesake.
Those participating in the activity adopted the hashtag #ForceFriday to discuss, across social media, all things Star Wars related, in an effort to share in their excitement and nostalgia.
We were curious to track the hashtag usage last Friday, September 4th, 2015, to see if we could garner the level of interest this retail based tag could generate. As one would expect, days leading up to, and days that followed had very minimal to no usage of the hashtag. However, if we look at the chart below, we can see discussion and interest peaked at over 13K tweets / hour!
By way of comparison, if you look at a previous article we wrote discussing #BlackFriday usage, you can see that while #ForceFriday may have obtained higher "peak" usage, total volume and sustained usage paled (as expected), in comparison. Despite this, there was no shortage of tweets by users describing long lines queuing up many hours before store openings.
Looking at "related hashtags" we can also see that much discussion was centered around not only the retail aspect, but excitement about the coming release of the movie as well. Needless to say, this holiday season expects to be a banner year for Star Wars related items.
Where will "The Force Awakens" rank in the series, especially as it relates to a difficult to please fan base? Time will tell, but if stirrings within social media have any bearing, it would appear Mr. Lucas' film making skills and marketing prowess are a "force" to be reckoned with.
