The Effect of Social Media on Buying Behavior

As a business on social media, a certain responsibility comes with interacting with your customers via those channels. You can only engage with customers when they want you to or when they are expecting a response from you. The point behind social media is not just to acquire customers. If that is your only goal then you are not utilizing social media to the best of its ability.

Social media is also a study of social behavior and the study of why customers buy what they do. Your marketers are able to use social media to create lots of messages about your products and services. However, it can only go so far as a business to customer standpoint. Your marketers can’t insert themselves on the customer-to-customer or peer-to-peer level where a lot of buying decisions get made.

Your company has the power to listen in on these social media channels though, as many keyword monitoring and data analysis tools have been created to help you. This can be a double-edged sword as you will be able to see every conversation in which a product of yours is being sold. The question for you and your company is do you respond to other users conversations?

This mostly depends on the size of your business. A small business could get away with it, but a medium or large business would be almost impossible to keep up with the amount of conversations about their products. Keep in mind that only a small percentage of customers want your company to enter into their conversation as well.

This is for general conversations about your product and whether or not people are going to buy it. When customers are complaining about your product or needing support with something, absolutely make sure to have a trained customer service representative respond to those users as soon as possible. This kind of response from a company will help boost customer satisfaction.

When customers are close to making a purchase they are more likely to listen to friends, family, the people they work with, the reviews of products on websites or any other number of sources. Due to this fact, social media needs to be seen as a more potential place to do product research. How are your products being received by your customers and have they brought up any concerns that can be fixed with a future product?

Remember that social media is more than a place to get customers. Once you have customers, you have to listen to their concerns and understand how they use your product. This is what will make you a successful company on social media.