What makes people look up certain search terms over others? Turns out that word-of-mouth is a much bigger influencer than traditional forms of advertising, and this is even more so true for social media users. These findings came out of a recent survey conducted by BIGresearch, for the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association (RAMA), and were reported by e-Marketer.
The study showed that face-to-face communication was the most important factor (at 41.4 percent) that influenced US social media users to start an online search for a specific product or service in December 2009. For average adults, face-to-face communication was also the most important factor, but to a lesser degree than social media users, at 36.1 percent.
What is also quite interesting is that cable television, though many talk about its coming demise, is the second most important influencer for people to start an internet search. This was true, once again, to a bigger extent for social media users (38.9 percent) than for average adults (32.8 percent). Even more interesting? Radio was the third most influential factor (who knew people still listened to radio?), and internet advertising was actually found to be a less influential factor than radio (though only by a few percentage points). Fifth in line was e-mail advertising, followed by online communities, blogs, and instant messaging.
When the study was broken down by age groups, those aged 18-to-34 were actually found to be more likely to search online because of something they saw on cable TV, than traditional word-of-mouth.
And while conventional wisdom might have told us that social media users were likely to be quite influenced by major online social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, they only influenced a quarter respondents to search for a product or service online. Not surprisingly, it was the 18-to-34 age group that was most likely to be influenced by their social network to search online, and the older groups were progressively less influenced.
E-Marketer had this to say about social media users: “Social media users are particularly attractive to marketers because they are more likely to both look for and give purchase advice than the general population.” This was shown by another of the study’s findings, which demonstrated that social media users also preferred giving advice face-to-face, and in fact, did so 71 percent of the time, after an online search.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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