In so many ways, social media and online shopping have grown up together. Everything has been said and done about taking advantage of social media to market & grow every business. Social media provides excellent outlets for people to share with their friends and family shopping experiences which have pleased them, and online shopping platforms are, in ever greater numbers, providing social media share buttons that help people get the word out about a certain businesses’ products or services. Therefore, influencing purchase decisions in a major way.
Knowledge Networks, an online research company, studied the purchase decisions of American and found that the probability of a consumer to learn and discover new products or brands is rising rapidly w/ 38 million 13 to 80 years old now influenced by social media, up 14% from just six months ago.
Millions referring to social media before purchasing.
Social media users in 2011 reported high levels of influence as follows:
1. 23.1 million discover new brands or products through social media (up 22% from 2010)
2. 22.5 million use social media to learn about unfamiliar brands or products (up 9% from 2010)
3. 17.8 million are “strongly influenced” in their purchase decisions by opinions in social media (up 19% from 2010)
4. 15.1 million refer to social media before making purchase decisions (up 29% from 2010)
5. Roughly 80 million people check social media from a mobile device
Consumers are now integrating social media as a part of their phone use with 40% of teens and adults who have ever used social media accessing it through their mobile device (up 28% from just 6 months ago). Location based services are rapidly increasing in size and popularity with Foursquare alone celebrating crossing the 10 million user mark. Mobile devices are playing an increasing role in purchase decisions as well with 27% of users comparing or checking prices via social media and 24% regularly checking reviews of locations, brands and services.
“Tying consumer interactions back to brands and purchase decisions is essential for marketers, in social media no less than any other platform,” said Patricia Graham, Chief Strategy Officer of Knowledge Networks. “While we have seen a dramatic rise in key metrics that quantify Social Media’s influence, we also have observed a wide variation of influence at the category level.”
“The on-the-go consumer is becoming more mobile in their social media usage,” said Chuck Martin, Director of the Center for Media Research at MediaPost Communications. “This move to mobility combined with the increasing influence of social media during the purchase process has great implications for marketers, who will have to look at location as well as which product purchases are most affected.”
Why Realtors should have social media presence?
Your prospective customers are going to research you online, read reviews, testimonials and comments about you. Having a social media strategy enables you to exert influence over the prospective customer during each stage of their research and buying process. The likes of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and FourSquare, help millions of people keep in touch with each other. Basically creating a location based online community. If you’re doing it the right way, real estate agents can really benefit from social media advertising. The opportunity to reach the community, display listings and open houses to be readily available for everyone to share, being offered a legitimate feedback (which is high on the list of what helps a businesses reputation). Stores of all sizes, real estate agents and other local business owners who fail to have a presence on social media sites may find themselves falling behind their competition. Today, people are as likely to log on using their telephones to share information about a business as they are to log into their computers to read about a business. So make sure they find you.
Credits to AgentGenius for the statistics
