We all know that our friends and families influence us if they give us a recommendation…or a ‘stay away!’ …for a vendor or business. And those recommendations have proliferated in the social media sphere through sites like facebook and Yelp. But here’s something most of us don’t know. In our latest social media research, we asked consumers if they read a post or comment about a restaurant or retailer, and if they did, how influential was it in deciding whether to visit that establishment. About 60 percent of consumers said they had read a post, and 81 percent said that it influenced them on where they chose to do business.*

 What’s more striking is that the numbers looked amazingly similar for vendor-generated posts. Seventy-eight percent of consumers said that those posts influenced where they chose to do business.

So your presence in social media is not just an afterthought, but should be a key part of  your marketing mix.

*People who gave a 3 or higher score on a 1 – 5 point scale.

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User Comments – Give us your opinion!
  • John Trone
    32347885
    At a minimum, all businesses should be monitoring social media for negative information and responding quickly. Our company, Allergy Free Table, is on the consumer side, and I often see negative comments repeated quickly, sometimes in hours, in social media, without any response from the business itself.
  • Michael Pingree
    29133817
    People have got to stop focusing on the "media" part of social media and instead focus on "social." Welcome to the era of word-of-mouth advertising which is driven by social media.
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Latest posts by Janet Eden-Harris
Janet Eden-Harris
Janet Eden-Harris is the CMO and SVP of Strategy for Market Force Information. She joined Market Force from J.D. Power and Associates, where she was VP of its Web Intelligence unit.
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