Retail brands spend months preparing for Black Friday. Campaigns are planned, creative is approved, paid budgets increase, and teams forecast inventory, promotions, and demand.
Most of that planning is focused on attracting more customers. And that’s exactly how it should be.
The part we don’t spend nearly as much time talking about is what happens once those customers arrive.
In Your Black Friday Plan Needs a Conversation Plan, we explored how social comments can help retailers prepare for the holiday shopping rush. Customer questions and feedback can reveal buying friction, shape messaging, and help brands build stronger campaigns before they launch.
To understand what happened once those campaigns were live, we compared Black Friday/Cyber Monday week to a typical week for retail brands in 2025. Comment volume increased, as expected, but it wasn’t the only thing that changed. Purchase intent grew, response rates slowed, more conversations happened outside business hours, and moderation became more challenging.
Looking across the data, one theme kept emerging. Black Friday doesn’t just test whether a campaign can attract attention. It tests how prepared a brand is for everything that attention brings with it.
Success Creates More Than Engagement
The typical retail brand saw comment volume increase by 178% during Black Friday/Cyber Monday week, reaching nearly three times the volume of a typical week.
As more shoppers discovered products, the comment section became busier in every sense of the word. Customers asked product questions before buying, compared options, looked for reassurance about shipping timelines, and shared their experiences. At the same time, spam increased, brand-damaging comments became more common, and community teams suddenly had far more conversations to manage than they would during a typical week.
Every new customer you attract has the potential to become a conversation that shapes someone else’s decision to buy.
Buying Signals Become Harder to Spot
During a typical week, purchase intent makes up about 4% of retail comments. During Black Friday, it increased to 7%. That might not sound like a dramatic shift until you remember it happened during a week when comment volume nearly tripled.
That’s more customers asking questions at the exact point they’re trying to make a purchase decision.
At the same time, retail brands responded to only about 4% of purchase intent comments, while overall response rates declined and response times stretched longer than they normally would.
When comment volume increases this quickly, customer questions are competing with shipping concerns, giveaway entries, spam, customer service issues, and everything else happening in the feed. The customers closest to buying become much harder to identify and respond to before the moment passes.
Visibility Brings Opportunity and Risk
The same campaigns attracting more customers also attracted more unwanted attention.
During Black Friday, hide rates increased as spam and brand-damaging comments became more common. That’s consistent with what we see whenever brands significantly increase their reach. Bigger audiences naturally bring a wider mix of interactions, and not all of them contribute to a healthy customer experience.
Paid social followed the same pattern, remaining considerably more toxic than organic content during Black Friday, just as we see throughout the rest of the year.
Greater visibility naturally brings more conversations to moderate. As audiences grow, keeping customer conversations helpful becomes just as important as growing them in the first place.
Customers Don’t Wait Until Monday Morning
One of the more interesting findings had nothing to do with what customers were saying. It was when they were saying it.
More than two-thirds of Black Friday comments happened outside standard business hours, a noticeable increase from a typical week.
That reflects the reality of how people shop. They browse after work, compare products late at night, and scroll throughout the holiday weekend whenever they have time.
This means some of the most valuable conversations happen outside of office hours, when fewer people are available to respond.
Every Comment is Part of the Customer Experience
Black Friday naturally brings more customer service questions, more frustration, and more uncertainty than a typical week because the purchase decisions need to be made before the deal is gone.
This was made clear in the sentiment data, with overall positivity declining during Black Friday. However, it also showed that moderation still had a measurable impact. Brands that moderated their comment sections significantly improved the sentiment visible to everyone else reading those conversations.
Comments aren’t just conversations with one customer. They’re often the first thing the next customer sees while deciding whether to trust your brand. Every answer, every unanswered question, and every spam comment contributes to that experience.
The Campaign Doesn’t End When Customers Arrive
One of the reasons Black Friday is such a useful moment to study is that it compresses weeks of customer activity into a few days. The same patterns appear throughout the year during product launches, seasonal campaigns, and viral moments. Black Friday simply makes them much easier to see.
Brands invest enormous amounts of time preparing customers to click. The data suggests it’s worth putting just as much thought into what happens after they do.
A successful campaign doesn’t end when it generates attention. That’s usually when the most important customer conversations begin, and those conversations can influence the people still deciding whether to buy.
Preparing for them isn’t separate from the campaign.
It’s part of delivering a better customer experience.
See Every Customer Conversation Across Your Creator Program.
See how Respondology helps brands manage the surge in comments that comes with high-profile campaigns like Black Friday, so your team can spend less time sorting through the noise and more time engaging with customers.
