Social Media as a Marketing Mix

We all know that our friends and families influence us if they give us a recommendation…or a ‘stay away!’ …for a vendor or business. And those recommendations have proliferated in the social media sphere through sites like Facebook, Urban Spoon and Yelp. But here’s something most of us don’t know. In a recent social media research conducted by the National Restaurant Association consumers were asked if they read a post or comment about a restaurant or retailer, and if they did, how influential was it in deciding whether to visit that establishment. About 60 percent of consumers said they had read a post, and 81 percent said that it influenced them on where they chose to do business.

 What’s more striking is that the numbers looked amazingly similar for vendor-generated posts. Seventy-eight percent of consumers said that those posts influenced where they chose to do business.

So if your presence in social media is just an afterthought, you should start to make it a key part of  your marketing mix.