Dive Brief:

• When it comes to social media buzz, Amazon leaves its rivals in the dust.

• The e-retail giant saw nearly 10 times Tweet mentions (509,000) than Wal-Mart (51,100) on Cyber Monday, according to data analytics company ListenFirst. 

• Target was a big topic on Twitter that day, too—an impressive 112,000—though a lot of the buzz is no doubt due to the #targetfail hashtag that was an outlet for complaints about its online traffic problems.

Dive Insight:

In many facets of retail, Amazon seems to be the retailer that is innovating and/or influencing several areas, from proprietary hardware to fulfillment.

“The truth is they’re building a really insurmountable infrastructure that I don’t see how others can really deal with,” Macquarie Securities analyst Ben Schachter, who studies Amazon, told the New York Times earlier this month. 

So the fact that it dominated on social media on Cyber Monday may come as no surprise. Still, while it’s not a point-for-point correlation, just how meaningful that buzz is for actual sales no doubt irks its rivals.

For example, Amazon’s sales on Cyber Monday were up 21.1%, according to estimates from Channel Advisor, compared to Adobe’s measure of 16% growth overall for the day.