50% of social media fans will purchase from a brand they follow. Is that all?

Emarketer has recently published the results of a survey, analysing the effect of following brands on Twitter. Of the total number of respondents, they found that 21 per cent were following a brand on Twitter, which is likely to be welcome news for brands as it represents a significant portion. It also shows the development of the service as a welcome platform for brands, rather than brands trying to muscle in on ‘personal’ space:

Then what happens?

The study then looks at the effect that following a brand has on the customer’s propensity to purchase or recommend. It found that 50 per cent of these followers were more likely to buy from the brand after following them on Twitter, with a slightly higher percentage likely to recommend them to friends.

While the figure of 50 per cent might seem high and that the brand has done its job by collecting followers, consider this with the fact that these followers are already going to be made up of existing customers, and the figure might not seem so impressive after all. A recent indication of why people follow brands shows that on Twitter, 23.5 per cent are already current customers, while Facebook comes in even higher at 32.9 per cent.

Emarketer’s own figures show this as being even higher, with 64 per cent claiming they were already a customer of the company they follow on Twitter.

The follow is the beginning

When you consider the numbers in context, it shows that brands still have a long way to go, to convert a follow into a real interest to buy. The problem is that many brands see the follow or fan as the ultimate goal. Marketing campaigns are carefully constructed to drive ‘likes’ on your Facebook Page through an engaging app for example, but far too often it stops there.

What these figures tell us is that the follow should be seen as the first step in the consumer journey, rather than the end goal in itself. There’s a lot of work to be done to find out how to influence purchase intent through social media, and social commerce is likely to provide the solution here. Though it’s only at the beginning, but as we find increasingly new ways to integrate the conversation with the purchase within one point, the true value of fans will be more apparent to brands.