Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Are Your Social Media Strategies Helping You Drive Sales?

Social media is one of many digital marketing tools available to businesses. Further, many know that listing their business on these social sites and posting to them regularly is important; but, are you measuring your success rates to know if your efforts are worth it? A survey conducted by Vision Critical provided some statistics on how customers use Pintrest, Facebook and Twitter and how likely these customers were to make purchases either online or in-store. Some of the key points are highlighted below. For the full report, follow this link. The survey included almost 6,000 respondents.

When you look at usage of these three social networks, you will find that 15 percent of the population uses Pintrest, 73 percent uses Facebook and 24 percent users Twitter. Of those people, 29 percent of Pintrest users made a purchase after sharing or liking an item, 38 percent of Facebook users did that same and then last were 22 percent of Twitter users. Taking those statistics into consideration, it is important to discover which social media networks your customers use as different topics are popular on varying platforms.

The survey results showed that for do-it-yourself projects, recipes and fashion and beauty tips, users look to Pintrest. Facebook was most popular for human interest or funny stories and topics that fall under arts and entertainment are popular across all three platforms.

Survey results also showed that 21 percent of Pinterest users made purchases in-store, 22 percent online and 29 percent made purchases both in-store and online. When it came to Facebook, 30 percent of users made in-store purchases, 29 percent did the same online and 38 percent did both. Finally, with Twitter, 17 percent of users made in-store purchases, 18 percent made online purchases and 22 percent made both.

There is no question that consumers use social media to research products that they will either buy in-store or online.  The question to ask yourself is which platform will help your business draw the most sales. In order to figure this out, you will need to consider your industry, customer demographics and determine what it is they use social media for. Then you can work on earning your portion of social media generated sales and hopefully in time, grow that number.


In addition to detailed statistics about purchases in relation to social media usage, the report also includes questions to ask your customers that will help you determine how to make these social media networks work best for your business. To join the world of ecommerce so you are able to take full advantage of these social media platforms along with other digital marketing tools, visit our website to learn about our solutions. Azox develops ecommerce websites that integrate fully with Microsoft Dynamics GP. We also provide payment processing solutions and online bill pay.