Social media makes people 10x more likely to buy

Jun 29, 2010 by Dirk Singer

There’s been a lot of research out about how social media recommendations can increase the chances of people buying products or services.

For instance, the other week Harris in the US found that 50% of under 35s followed the recommendations of social media friends, compared to 17% who acted on celebrity endorsements.   And last year Comscore released a study showing that ‘social search’ (social media activity and paid search together) was 233% more effective than search advertising alone.

However,  a recent study featured in Marketing Magazine in particular is worth noting.   It shows that people accessing an online retailer via social media are 10x more likely to buy something than a visitor that comes to the site cold.

According to Sage Pay, on average 7% of visitors to an online store will make a purchase.   However, if directed to the retailer via social media, the % of visitors who will go to the transaction section goes up to 71%.

Especially when compared with a click-through rate that can be as low as 0.02% for display ads, those figures are fairly compelling.   Yet, in the same Sage Pay survey, only 5% of marketers with responsibility for online marketing said that social media was the most effective communications channel.

This is one of the items that we featured this week at Rabbit on our regular ‘Rabbit Feed’ – more details here

Image – Daniel Weir, Via Flickr

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