What Consumers Use Facebook For [STATS]

What social network should you be using to grow your business? It depends on who your customers are. Research is often time-consuming, but definitely worth the effort. Once that is sorted, everything else falls into place.

And when you have to decide which platform to pick, what instantly comes to your mind? Is it Facebook? After all, it is the biggest social networking site and is where the people are.

A new study from ExactTarget and CoTweet reveals why how to engage your consumers on Facebook and what makes it a unique platform for marketers compared to other social networking channels.

Consumers Like Discounts on Facebook

• 40% of consumers are motivated to ‘like’ a brand on Facebook to be entitled to discounts and promotions.
• Following closely behind, 39% want to show their support for the brand
• 34% want to receive the latest updates.
• Education and interaction are the least popular (13%) reasons. It may be difficult for marketers to create conversations about your brand, try posting questions to create a dialogue.
• This result is consistent with a study by Razorfish last year

“Like” ≠ I Want To Know Anything & Everything

70% of consumers who had “FANNED” a brand on Facebook felt that they had not given this company permission to market to them. This makes sense as it tallies with the information above, if about 40% were for the promotions, apparently the remaining weren’t. Only 17% of consumers say they were more likely to buy after becoming a FAN on Facebook.

Reasons Why We Are on Facebook

• It is undeniable we use social networking sites mainly for the connections (which we believe should be dominated by women!)
  Leveraging on this information, is it possible that your campaign contain content interesting enough to be shared among friends?
• Only 15% of Facebook users are there to maintain work/professional contacts.
• While 30% of all Facebook users and45% of daily users report checking email during work or school hours, they’re less likely to check Facebook during these times, restricting use to nights and weekends. In total, 65% of Facebook users say they login only before or after work/school and 69% use Facebook on the weekends or days off.  This means marketers would need to work extra hours during weekends where traffic would be higher!

For some case studies, read five successful business pages that have done well on Facebook.