Social media increases “face to face interaction”

Oct 29, 2010 by Dirk Singer

Hours spent on Facebook and Twitter makes you forget about the real world, right? Wrong. If anything the opposite is true, according to research by email marketing firm ExactTarget (via Marketing Charts).

ExactTarget’s ‘Social Mythbusting‘ study confirms what many of us on social networks know first hand, you often meet people face to face after first making contact with them on sites such as Twitter. And Facebook can often act as social glue between friends.

ExactTarget says that 27% of Facebook users meet friends in person more, while only 13% meet them less. And looking at Twitter, the results are even more pronounced – 46% meet friends in person more and 7% meet them less. Hence, social recommendations can quickly turn into real world ones too.

Facebook brand fans won’t necessarily buy, but they will recommend

The study seeks to debunk a number of other ‘myths.’ For example, the one about the average Facebook fan being worth over $100. No, less than 1/5 of Facebook fans are more likely to buy your stuff says ExactTarget, so if you are focused on selling to them you are wasting a lot of your time and may even end up annoying them.

Instead you need to think about how you leverage that community to become your advocates and spread messages.

However again the more immediate nature of Twitter means that many Twitter followers will be more likely to buy, though again common sense should apply – ramming sales messages down their throats obviously isn’t going to get you very far.