Social Media Buries the Old Media This Holiday Season | Daily Deal ...

According to a study released this week by Offerpop, the vast majority of consumers have absconded newspapers and television as favored shopping guides. Taking the place of these withering mainstays is the vast array of online social networks.

In its study entitled ?Social Media and Holiday Shopping: An Analysis of Consumer Attitudes?, Offerpop has found the following trends amongst modern-day consumers:

• 90 percent are likelier to shop for brands based on positive exposure through social media
• 61 percent are likely to use social media as a shopping guide
• 32 percent feel that product-discovery is the most useful aspect of social media

While people turn to networks like Amazon, Facebook, Groupon and Pinterest for information and recommendations, only 7 percent find it necessary to go public with their purchases.

According to Offerpop co-founder and CMO Mark Cooper, the above percentages stress the newfound importance for strong social media brands, especially during the holiday shopping season. Noting how consumers use the internet for product information, he advises businesses to take the reins and guide people through the purchasing process.

When people were asked which sources they use most often for help with making buying decisions, the answers were given as follows:

• 25 percent look to reviews and editorials
• 25 percent make purchases based on word-of-mouth
• 20 percent specifically mention social media as their primary source
• 12 percent make purchases based on TV ads

If one reads between the lines of this survey, the top two answers could easily correlate with social media, which offers an abundance of comments, editorials and reviews on products. Advertisements of all kinds seem to have taken the greatest hit, with newspaper and internet ads bottoming out the survey at 9 and 4 percent.

Some of the more probing questions posed in the survey offered similar encouragements towards social media:

• 63 percent are likely to be influenced in their buying decisions by social media
• 35 percent believe that holiday-gift discovery is the most useful aspect of social media
• 20 percent fine-tune their holiday shopping by tracking the ?want? lists of friends and family
• 20 percent are more enticed to buy when purchase protocols are directly linked to product images

Consumers turn to social media most frequently when seeking information on fashion, travel and electronics.

One thing consumers are unlikely to do is tell others about their purchases. Considering how holiday shopping is all about surprises, Cooper asserts that website functions for purchase-sharing are imprudent in the world of e-commerce.

In order to maximize click-through rates and sales this holiday season, Cooper insists that the two highest goals for all online retailers are consumer awareness and engagement.

(The Offerpop study was conducted during September and October of 2012 with assistance from Liel Leibovitz, a Professor of Communications at New York University, who gathered data from a cross-section of American consumers.)

Source: SFGate

Source: http://www.dailydealmedia.com/789social-media-buries-the-old-media-this-holiday-season/

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