Earlier this month New Media Age reported on a piece of research claiming that only a small percentage of people buy based on social recommendations - 5.1% in this particular study - as opposed to email (9%).
According to another recent study, 71% of visitors coming to a site via social media actually completed a transaction, as opposed to 7% of all visitors in total ('Social media helps drive purchases').
You've probably seen other pieces of apparently conflicting research such as these. I'm often asked for the short answer. Never mind the marketing fluffery, does social media drive sales or not?
Of course, it's not easy to interpret stats without going through the source data and research methodology in fine detail. But it's tempting to give more weight to data that's based on analytics rather than reliant on questionnaires and self-reporting. How often have you been asked, when ordering something online or on the phone, 'how did you hear about us?' And how often have you been able to answer accurately? If only people were as reliable as computers! (Erm, that's a joke. Sort of.)
One way to think about the role of social media in purchase decisions is to imagine what marketers sometimes refer to as the sales funnel. In the days of 20th century marketing, we were told that people were to be pushed through an imaginary funnel, through stages of awareness, interest, desire and action ('AIDA') - action being the point of purchase. The model was tinkered with over the years, but it now looks quite different. Here's Dave Evans's take on it - the 'Social Feedback Cycle' taken from his book Social Media Marketing, an Hour a Day:
Rather than marketing coming to an end at the point of purchase, it continues long after - and is carried out not under the control of the marketers but rather their customers.
In the days of one-way, broadcast marketing, 'after sales' service was generally considered to be unrelated to the sales process. The legacy of this can still be seen at companies where the sales phone number is free to call and answered promptly, but once you're a customer you have to call a premium 0870 number then wait in a long queue.
Social media affects our attitudes and opinions long before we reach the purchase stage, often before we even need or want whatever it is someone's selling. So trying to draw a direct correlation between what gets said or shared in social networks and actual transactions is far from easy.
But for as long as people want straight, simple answers, you can be sure plenty of folks will keep trying to provide them.
