One of the largest U.S. retailers, Target, has already made use of Twitter’s Promoted Trends service to advertise their deals. Other large department stores such as BestBuy and Walmart are making use of Twitter to tweet about deals.

BestBuy, a popular electronic equipment retailer has the largest number of followers on Twitter among all the retailers. Kate Kaye from Clickz reports that BestBuy posted 70 tweets on the 26th of November (Black Friday) highlighting the various deals they were offering clients. They also posted their Cyber Monday deals on Sunday itself to entice buyers earlier. This is an interesting move, as reports from comScore suggest that Cyber Monday was the second largest spending day last year, with sales of $887 million taking place on that day alone.

$1 Billion Sales Record

This year too, an estimated 88% of U.S. online retailers took part in Cyber Monday sales and some of them even offered week-long deals. The efforts seem to have paid off well, as comScore reports that Cyber Monday sales for this year hit an all-time record, surpassing the $1 Billion mark!

Among other retailers, Walmart, which has over 90,000 followers on Twitter had 49 posts on Black Friday, with several deals being offered. Home Depot also had 41 posts fro Black Friday advertising items ranging from ornaments and tiles to appliances. Other U.S. retailers who made use of Twitter for Black Friday included Staples, Sears, Macy’s, Lowe’s, J C Penney and Kohl’s.

Kohl’s promotes shopping deals on their Twitter account

Target is believed to have spent thousands of dollars to sponsor their Promoted Tweets a week before Black Friday.

These figures indicate that Twitter in particular, and social media in general, are becoming extremely popular advertising channels and small businesses should also start taking advantage of them in order to reach a larger audience.

Best Buy Mobile will install these apps on all compatible smartphones including BlackBerry, Windows Phones and S60 (Symbian OS)  phones for free in their stores at the time of purchase. This program has been branded ‘Walk Out Working’.

Google has even created a new micro-site to provide details of this new method by which users can get the Google Mobile App installed on their phones. The site includes a Google Maps application that allows visitors to find the nearest Best Buy stores.

While it is already possible for users to download the Google Mobile search application from the Google Mobile site, m.google.com, directly, it is expected that this new alliance will drive adoption of the application to more regular (non-technical) consumers.

The main features available on the mobile search app are:

• One-click access to Google search
• Voice querying – users can just speak their query into the phone
• ‘My Location’ – allows users to search for local businesses, without having to type in their location
• Google Suggest – provides suggestions for queries and local businesses even as the user types his query
• Links to other Google apps such as Gmail and Google Maps.

Users will also be shown a demo of these apps in action by a Best Buy Mobile representative.

Scott Moore, the Vice President of Best Buy Mobile says, “We know that consumers want smartphones and increasingly, they want to use applications. The challenge is that people still need help understanding what is available to them and how they can bring it to life on their device.”

The partnership between Google and Best Buy Mobile is obviously a step in that direction.