A display of bacon, valet parking, DVD sales, and really expensive avocados. What do these things all have in common? They are all topics shoppers are tweeting about while at Walmart.

As a fun experiment, the Locately team took some time to look at what shoppers inside Walmart stores were tweeting about. One component of our location analytics platform is a database that has the actual physical footprint (boundaries) of each retail store. We applied this database to Twitter’s stream of geo-tagged tweets to find tweets that users created while they were standing inside a Walmart store.

The data were collected over four weeks and included stores across the U.S. Below are some of our interesting findings about these tweets:

1. Walmart shoppers are using social check-ins to broadcast their location.

Mobile apps such as Foursquare allow users to “check in” to a business to tell their friends where they are and socialize. From our data, a whopping 37% of tweets were check-ins from one of these social sharing apps. Many of these tweets were simply check-ins accompanied with little or no content. About 55% of tweets were what we call “other tweets,” which include replies to other Twitter users about topics unrelated to shopping or Walmart, or general musings.

2. Foursquare is the most used social check-in platform.

Foursquare is the leader of this space and our results supported this: 88% of check-ins were from Foursquare. Gowalla was far behind with 6% and SCVNGR and other services barely registered.

We were surprised to find that a relatively unknown check-in service called WeReward captured 4% of checkins. While WeReward is not one of the top mobile check-in services out there, it seems to have found a niche with deal-hunting consumers. According to its website, WeReward is a check-in service offering cash rewards to its users for checking in to stores. This incentive is clearly working for Walmart shoppers!

3. Shoppers are sharing photos while inside the store

About 8% of the tweets we collected were photos – a respectable amount! We have found that shoppers enjoy snapping photos of products they like, sales that they are excited about, and other amusing sights they see in Walmart. Below are examples of photos real shoppers tweeted.

"Weird barilla changed their packaging" - Twitter user @vagheesh

“Too much bacon” – Twitter user @E_nasty_89

4. People of Walmart: Are They Happy or Really Annoyed?

Walmart shoppers were not shy about expressing their opinions about their shopping experiences in their tweets. It seemed that many used Twitter to vent their frustrations with long lines at the register or the behavior of other shoppers. There were few shoppers who expressed being happy with their experience at Walmart. Here is the breakdown of positive versus negative tweets:

Consumers whose tweets expressed positive sentiment towards Walmart most commonly mentioned prices and the great selection of products.

The complaint shoppers tweeted about most, by far, was long lines.

So what are the key takeaways from our analysis?

• For Walmart shoppers on Twitter, Foursquare dominates the “check-in” space.
• Shoppers increasingly enjoy snapping photos while perusing products, especially when they find something amusing or interesting about the display. This is an opportunity for manufacturers to engage with shoppers and should be taken into account as part of package design and shopper marketing.