Which Online Services Influence Purchases?

The team here at Creative Content Company work hard to ensure that our clients get the most from their online presence, but we have recently come across some research from Technorati Media that shows us exactly which services are most likely to influence a purchase by a customer from your business and we would like to share this research with you.

Retail sites, unsurprisingly perhaps, are the most likely to influence a purchase with 56% (more than half of those surveyed) of people being influenced by them.

Brand Sites come in a close second with 34% of customers feeling it is those sites that influences their purchase and in third place 31.1% of people feel that the blog posts they read are what influences their purchase of a product or service. This, again, goes to show why we are always telling our clients and contacts to blog for their businesses to achieve more online.

Next up we have Facebook with 30.8% of the votes from customers and 28% of the votes goes to Groups and Forums; this shows us that while it is good to post on Facebook on your business social media page, you also need to engage with the groups and forums on this social media platform and across the web to have a higher chance of influencing customer to purchase your product or service from you.

YouTube and Linkedin closely behind, both with 27% of people saying that these social media platforms would influence a purchase – this goes to show that Linkedin while treated as a social media recruitment site for many users, is actually a really good place to influence your potential customers to make a purchase from your business.

20% of people stated Google would influence their purchase and another 20% saying online magazines would influence their purchase of a service or product; perhaps it might be best to do a guest blog for that online magazine that keep asking you to?

Then at the bottom of the chart we have 12% of people saying Pinterest influences their sale, 8% choosing Twitter, 7% choosing news sites and the last 3% choosing Instagram.

How could this research help you decide what to use to influence your target audience to make a purchase from your business? If you’ve decided you need to look at business blogging or social media management then give us a call.