One of the things that always fascinated me about social web is the power of influence is no longer in the hands of a select few and everyone can have a share of voice. The recent report in Afaqs by Kapil Ohri discusses how a small brands like restaurants, juice centers and dental clinics in India leveraging the social channels like Facebook better than Big brands. It’s also interesting to note that
“These brands are leveraging Facebook for customer engagement and to drive sales”
not just creating fans by numbers. You can read the report below.
We have heard enough number of times that the power of social media is peer influence, the consumers or users will get influenced by the tone of conversations about your brand on blogs, twitter, forums and other social channels. But how influential are these conversations and social channels on the consumer behavior?. The recent study by Invoke focuses on how this trust varies from brand messages to friends posts to network of friends messages and also does the trustworthiness varies across channels like Blog, Facebook or Twitter?
As reported by eMarketer - the blog posts were more likely to be trusted than posts on Facebook, and trust dropped off sharply when it came to Twitter, even among friends.
Also while consumers are pushing the brands to use social channels - their messages were trusted less and in general Twitter messages were trusted less compared to other social channels even when posted by the user friends.
While reviews on Amazon incredibly helped them to drive the sales even when people who posted them are not connected to the users and the group of reviews including positive/negative highlights might have helped people to increase their trustworthiness. It would be interesting to see how the proposed integration between Amazon and Facebook will play out when you can filter the reviews based on your social graph. Do you think it will increase the trustworthiness when more and more brands integrate social graph based filters in to their e-commence websites?.
I handle the product development at GizaPage, a social media hub and apps platform to help brands build and manage their social identity.You can connect with me on @amnigos or drop me an email to vijay [at] gizapage [dot] com
