Gone are the days when social media was all about conversations and a mode of connecting with people. Today, it is vastly about commerce. It has largely affected a consumer’s buying habits as with the existing social media platforms the traditional word-of-mouth marketing is drastically evolved.

Today social networks have a huge impact on consumer behavior as consumers can post and purchase with a single click on their smartphones. This has tremendously reduced the efforts of physically going to stores and looking through products as they can easily just scroll through their social feeds and shop online. Also, the process of purchasing the products online costs less and saves time.

So, here are the three most important reasons how and why social media has such a huge impact on consumer behavior.

Direct Purchases from Social Media Networks

There was a time when word-of-mouth, radio ads, and TV were the best and fastest ways of learning about brands. But social media has successfully replaced all these traditional ways and today knowing and exploring a brand is much easier.

Earlier, social media was only used to connect with people and share ideas with friends as well as loved ones, but it has been a decade now that these social media platforms are intertwined with building businesses from scratch.

Many consumers have reported that social networks help them a lot to learn about a brand they heard about somewhere or discover new brands as well. In short, social media is a place where you can explore, discover and immediately purchase from various brands. Social commerce sales are rapidly growing and it is estimated that they will generate billions of dollars worth of sales by 2023.

Nowadays, consumers are attracted to social media handles whose content is aligned with their interests. With respect to that, targeting your audiences with similar interests plays an important role in marketing your products. Social media, in a very organic way, bridges the gap between consumers and marketers.

The vast majority of customers use social media for entertainment and to purchase products from their influencers. It will be a very wise decision on the part of influencers and brands to consider creating innovative and new strategies for the products and services that they want to deliver to their potential buyers.

Let’s understand this point of direct purchases from social media through an example, in 2014, Facebook introduced a feature called “Buy” which is a call-to-action button for page posts and ads that help customers purchase any products from businesses directly. This feature allowed Facebook users to carry out purchases without leaving the app. In this way, other platforms also gradually entered the business such as Shoppable Instagram, Pinterest Pins, Snapchat, etc.

Two-Way Engagement Opportunity with Brands

Social media provides a two-way engagement opportunity with brands. This has completely changed the dynamics of the brand-customer relationship. Today, interactions with brands and businesses are easier because social media platforms let you easily discover brands and let you communicate with them. Consumers can easily engage and interact with businesses on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter by liking their posts and following their accounts or sharing brand-related content.

This creates a necessity for businesses to have an online presence and more importantly a social presence. Regular posting on these social media platforms, creating campaigns for their brands to reach potential customers, and even thoroughly understanding the needs of the customers help the businesses grow manifolds. Social presence allows businesses to easily reach out to their audience to sell a product or service. To top that, even consumers love it when brands have a social presence and actively interact and engage with their customers in creative ways. In this way, the relationship between the customers and the marketer remains transparent, which results in gaining the trust of the consumers.

The customers also develop confidence in the brands, knowing that they have received the best services from the businesses in which they have invested their money.

The Social Media Influencer Impact

An English author, Susan Cooper on social media quoted,” Engage, Enlighten, Encourage and especially… just be yourself! Social media is a community effort, everyone is an asset”. When talking about social media we cannot go about it without mentioning social media influencers.

Social media influencers have a significant impact on consumer behavior. They are now a huge part of our everyday lives and an important link that connects a brand to the right audience and attracts a larger set of audience. It has so far proven to be the best and a very crucial way for brands to reach out and target new customers.

The popularity of the social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter has grown immensely in the last two decades. As more and more people joined some chose to stay the content consumers while others went ahead to become the content creators and so we got influencers.  While it gave many commoners the chance to grow big and famous it also helped existing celebrities to build a strong presence on social media.

The way these influencers review and promote brands has helped and converted many customers into buyers just because of the relationship an influencer has built with their audience. Influencers create a lot of customer loyalty and this pushes brands to go ahead and collaborate with influencers.

Wrapping It Up

Social media has largely impacted consumer behavior by easing their buying decisions. It all comes down to having and implementing the right social media marketing strategies. Customers are only interested in getting the right products and services from the right people. In the present world, through social media, consumers relate more to influencers and brands that can provide some value to their customers through their services.

There‘s no doubt about the fact that nowadays, content is king. Making useful content for the consumer will help any business grow rapidly. For that, choosing the right social media platforms helps brands convert visitors into customers and thus has an impact on global consumer behavior, which adds value through their services.