Here's what makes social customers go from liking to buying on social networks

With millions being spent by companies on digital advertising and maintaining the prim and proper look of official pages and profiles, how do users go from liking a page to purchasing its goods and services? A recent survey shows that it is engaging content that eventually gets users to purchase a product.

The research, From Social to Sale: 8 Questions to Ask Your Customers, was conducted by Vision Critical. The survey saw 6,000 responses on purchasing socially over a 17-month period. The study covers social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

What’s popular in which social network?

Some key findings that came about as part of the research showed 4 in 10 social media users have indeed gone out and purchased an item in-store or online after sharing and favouriting it on Twitter Facebook or Pinterest. In fact, social media drives roughly the equal amounts of online and in-store purchasing. The purchases are usually made within 1 week of sharing and favouriting an item. It was also noted that while Twitter and Facebook purchasers are more likely to make social media-related purchases of products they had already been researching, Pinterest, being a visually rich medium drives more spontaneous purchases.

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The report stresses on the need for not just understanding the product, but also the platform and the make up of your customers. A good mixture of content, culture and category is what seems to drive sales up not just online but also in-stores, according to Vision Critical. Nearly 1 in 3 users of Facebook have gone ahead and purchased an item after sharing, liking or commenting on it on the website. If you select the right kind of platform as a marketer and go on to engage with your audience well enough, it will show considerable increase in product sales, says Vision Critical’s survey results.

Some more interesting bits that came out of the report were that it was seen that technology is king as far as online purchases go. 34 percent of Twitter and 25 percent of Facebook purchasers have said that their most recent social-inspired purchase was a gadget.

Pinterest has also turned out to be quite a wild-card as far as driving sales is concerned. A huge 47 percent of Pinterest purchasers said that they “happened upon” the item they pinned and purchased without searching for it. 28 percent of them say that they had been searching for the item they pinned and purchased. Food, art goods and gardening items drive up Pinterest’s social-to-sale purchasing.