Tourism & Hospitality | Tuesday 2 February, 2016 5:18 pm |

Largest shopping and entertainment extravaganza in the Middle East, the Dubai Shopping Festival (DSF) celebrated its 21st anniversary this year. DSF commenced from the first of Jan under the tagline “Unwrap The Exceptional”. Meltwater, global media intelligence firm that offers tools for online news and social media monitoring takes a look at the festival highlights on social media.

 

DSF acquired more than 2550 mentions on social media in the UAE between Jan 1st and 1st Feb. An analysis of the comments on social media for DSF, using Meltwater tools, shows that the highest amount of the conversations about DSF took place on Twitter 86.63% followed by Facebook 13.20% . The demographics shows female participation around 90% as compared to men at 10%.

 

The highest volume of conversations took place on Friday 22nd of Jan with the most popular hashtags representing the event #DSF2016 and #MyDSF used approximately 91.2%

 

“Event organisers are increasingly tapping the power of social media to create greater engagement with communities for large scale public events,” as stated by Zubair Timol, Area Director for India, Middle East & Africa at Meltwater. “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.”

 

Using Meltwater tools, show that 50.72% positive mentions included comments about DSF celebrations at the Global Village, Global Village World Party, celebrity presence, Carnival at the Beach JBR, and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast show.

 

Every day through DSF, Visa customers were able to avail themselves incredible offers when purchasing with Visa card. Also, giving complete access to all retail festive offers, ADIB Dubai Festivals App introduced by Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank (ADIB) listed all the Dubai Shopping Festival 2016 retail offers in one place, these exceptional DSF offers introduced by VISA and ADIB were mentioned around 625 times.

 

The ‘talk of the town’ entertainment shows that took place during DSF were comedy rock-star Russell Peters’ ‘Almost Famous World Tour’ to Dubai on January 19th and 20th at the Dubai World Trade Center. With record attendance at the show, conversations peaked to 37.2%, with hashtag #RussellPetersDXB.