Not only are social fans more likely to buy and recommend brands, but their friends are also likely to follow suit. So says new research from Morpace finds that more than two-thirds of Facebook users would take a Facebook friend’s referral of a product or service seriously enough to consider actually purchasing it.
The degree of this finding, though, is impacted by the Facebook user’s racial and ethnic background, the study also found, according to eMarketer. White Facebook users were generally least likely to become a fan of brands and retailers, while Hispanics were most likely to become fans in all the categories studied by Morpace.
One-half of Hispanic respondents said Facebook was a good tool for researching new products, compared with 46% of Asians, 44% of African-Americans and only 31% of whites.
Trusting Friends
It’s another data point for marketers that want to unlock the power of their social networks - and unfortunately for them, a data point that conflicts with other research. For example, according to Edelman’s recent trust barometer, 75% of consumers don’t believe their peers will give them good advice or information about a company. Last year that number was 55%.
Outside events can account for some of the eroding trust in peers, according to Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman. "The events of the last 18 months have scarred people," he said. (via Advertising Age). The solution for marketers, he said, is to saturate. Consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it, he says. "That means experts as well as peers or company employees. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."
A New Definition of Peer
Also consider that social networking is changing the definition of 'peer', according to Jesse Stanchak at SmartBlog on Social Media.
Stanchak's advice to marketers is not to take the relationships on social networks all that seriously. For instance, he talks to the person whose opinion on movies he most trusts, his former roommate, via instant message - not Facebook. "As far as Facebook knows, he isn't any more important to me than any of my other friends. My social graph is filled with little contradictions like this."
Another problem is that the number of social networking applications and networks is becoming mind numbing, according to Greg Sterling, principal of Sterling Market Intelligence. "It is almost becoming a parody - every company has to have its finger in this space. For people who follow tech - including marketers - such developments are intriguing to follow. But what about average people who don't have all day to devote to following such issues? I would suspect a lot of this is white noise to them."
