Largest shopping and entertainment extravaganza in the Middle East, the Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF), celebrated its 21st anniversary this year. DSF commenced from January 1, under the tagline ‘Unwrap The Exceptional’. It had already acquired more than 2550 mentions on social media in the UAE until February 1.
Meltwater, a global media intelligence firm that offers tools for online news and social media monitoring took a look at the festival highlights on social media.
While it was noted that the highest amount of the conversations about DSF took place on Twitter (86.63 percent) and Facebook (13.20 percent), the demographics showed female participation to be 90 percent as compared to 10 percent of men .
The highest volume of conversations about the festival took place on January 22, 2016 with the most popular hashtags representing the event #DSF2016 and #MyDSF. This was followed by comedy rock-star Russell Peters ‘Almost Famous World Tour’ to Dubai on 19th and 20th January at the Dubai World Trade Center. With record attendance at the show, conversations peaked to 37.2 percent, with hashtag #RussellPetersDXB.
“Event organizers are increasingly tapping the power of social media to create greater engagement with communities for large scale public events. Keeping track of social media chatter about DSF enables event organizers, retailers, sponsors and brands to stay on top of their reach and how their messages are being received by their target audience, the most popular activities and offers and the effectiveness of their marketing and promotional campaigns,” stated Zubair Timol, Area Director for India, Middle East & Africa, Meltwater.
Meltwater tools also revealed that 50.72 percent of the total positive mentions about DSF celebrations were made about the Global Village, Global Village World Party, celebrity presence, Carnival at the Beach JBR, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast show. And the exceptional offers made by Visa and Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) during DSF got mentioned around 625 times on Social Media.
