Retailers “forced” to embrace social media

Sep 26, 2010 by Dirk Singer

The last post was about (UK) Xmas online sales being projected to increase by 23% this year. Now the Aberdeen Group has come out with a study showing that (US) retailers are indeed starting to embrace social strategies, but that they are being dragged there by their customers.

According to Emarketer, “more than half of retailers felt they had been pushed into using social media because more consumers were using it as a primary shopping vehicle.” The second most important reason is that the competition is doing it – and noone wants to be last in this space.

The most important social media tools were “social networks” at 85% (what about the other 15%?), micro-blogging – so Twitter (51%), and blogs (43%).

The Aberdeen Group says that there is some confusion about how to measure social media activity, but in fact the table below seems sensible to me: Quality of customer insights (43%) is above quality (36%) and quantity (31%) of new sales leads, which points to retailers understanding social media a bit better than what the Aberdeen Group report implies.