Whether you choose to view the consumer’s pur­chase jour­ney as a sales fun­nel or a flight path (Google’s Zero Moment Of Truth), one thing is clear. Con­sumer behav­ior is more com­plex and involves more infor­ma­tion­al touch points than ever before.

What Role Does Social Media Really Play In This World?

Accord­ing to author Dave Evans in his book Social Media Mar­ket­ing, social media links con­sumer expe­ri­ences of a brand, not a brand’s promise to the con­sumer. In terms of mod­els, such as the sales fun­nel or even Google’s ZMOT, this trans­lates into the fact that social media is large­ly being used to by con­sumers to val­i­date a brand’s claims made in oth­er chan­nels. Let’s take an exam­ple. I’m sit­ting at home in the evening. I’m watch­ing TV. I also hap­pen to be “dual screen­ing” with my tablet device. I see a TV ad for a brand. Strip aside all the cre­ative imagery, music and words, and you are typ­i­cal­ly left with a basic, under­ly­ing mes­sage: “We think our prod­uct is great. You should buy it.” On one lev­el, the mar­keter’s job is part­ly achieved (i.e., brand vis­i­bil­i­ty). But will I imme­di­ate­ly grab my iPad and buy the prod­uct online or make a men­tal note to seek out that brand next time I’m in the super­mar­ket? Almost cer­tain­ly not. The like­li­hood that any­one will imme­di­ate­ly accept a brand’s propo­si­tion is extreme­ly remote. We are much more like­ly to want to val­i­date a brand’s claims through oth­er sources. And one of our first points of call will be Google. Glob­al PR firm Edel­man has for many years been con­duct­ing research into con­sumer trust.

In recent times, the head­line find­ings have cen­tered around our con­tin­u­ing lev­els of dis­trust in busi­ness, gov­ern­ment, and the media. Our most trust­ed sources remain oth­er peo­ple who we think are “like us.” How­ev­er, in Edel­man’s 2014 sur­vey, a rather star­tling fact emerged. Con­sumers trust Google’s search results more than any oth­er source except for our peers, friends, and fam­i­ly. Google is turn­ing into a brand val­i­da­tion engine. Sim­i­lar­ly, social media is being used as a mech­a­nism for val­i­dat­ing mar­ket­ing claims. Ear­li­er this year at Brand Republic’s Social Sum­mit con­fer­ence in Lon­don, Twit­ter UK Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Bruce Dais­ley point­ed out that UK Twit­ter users will per­form on aver­age one search per day via the plat­form. In oth­er words, Twit­ter is a social search engine. Con­sumers are proac­tive­ly seek­ing out what con­ver­sa­tions can be dis­cov­ered about brands and their promis­es. The result­ing con­ver­sa­tions have a big influ­ence on whether these con­sumers will pro­ceed from con­sid­er­a­tion to pur­chase – or will con­tin­ue on their deci­sion-mak­ing path, depend­ing on your sales behav­ior mod­el of choice.

What Can Marketers Deduce From This Consumer Behavior?

First, the evi­dence is mount­ing that social media is large­ly a con­sump­tion medi­um rather than an engage­ment medi­um. Take Twit­ter again as an exam­ple. Even if brand accounts have large num­bers of fol­low­ers, there are all man­ner of rea­sons why that sim­ple fol­low­er count should not be used as a proxy for gen­uine reach:

• Many of those fol­low­ers may be fakes.
• Even if there are real peo­ple attached to those accounts, how many of them will even see the con­tent you post?
• Even if peo­ple do see what you post, how have they dis­cov­ered that con­tent? Did they stum­ble across it in their feed or were they active­ly seek­ing to val­i­date your claim from else­where (such as a TV ad)?

In the absence of hard data direct from the social plat­forms them­selves, mar­keters have been forced to rely upon proxy social data. Total­ing up the fol­low­er num­bers of Twit­ter accounts who share your con­tent pro­vides a “poten­tial impres­sion” num­ber. If you’ve based your sales and mar­ket­ing cal­cu­la­tions on impres­sions and fre­quen­cy num­bers, would 10 mil­lion poten­tial Twit­ter expo­sures real­ly gen­er­ate the kind of gen­uine brand vis­i­bil­i­ty need­ed to trans­late into mean­ing­ful sales and prof­it fig­ures? What if you real­ly could see how many peo­ple real­ly did have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to be exposed to your con­tent via social, and what if you could use this data in com­bi­na­tion with insight into what roles social media real­ly does play in a con­sumer pur­chase jour­ney? As it hap­pens, devel­op­ments among some of the big social media plat­forms to deliv­er bet­ter data and insight to adver­tis­ers has had the knock on effect of more robust impres­sion data being made avail­able. For exam­ple, Twit­ter rolled out its ana­lyt­ics plat­form to all users in July.

One of the key pieces of data revealed via the dash­board is a real “impres­sions” fig­ure – the num­ber of peo­ple who real­ly had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to see and engage with your con­tent. Twit­ter is look­ing at which tweets real­ly did appear on a screen or mobile device that a real human being actu­al­ly had a chance of see­ing in the first place. The real­i­ty is quite sober­ing. On aver­age, each tweet will be seen by rough­ly 3 to 5 per­cent of your fol­low­er base. That’s a sig­nif­i­cant­ly small­er num­ber than “poten­tial impres­sions” gained by sim­ply tak­ing fol­low­er counts as a proxy for reach.

Implications For Consumer Marketers

If you’ve been plan­ning and mea­sur­ing suc­cess in social media around broad met­rics, such as poten­tial impres­sions, then you need to prop­er­ly eval­u­ate what those num­bers are real­ly telling you. You also need to recon­sid­er what data you should be using to deter­mine the make up of your mar­ket­ing mix in rela­tion to the con­sumer pur­chase jour­ney. In short, con­sumer mar­keters have to acknowl­edge the com­plex­i­ty of the con­sumer deci­sion jour­ney. More research and effort up front to deter­mine what those deci­sion paths actu­al­ly are should help to deter­mine what role indi­vid­ual mar­ket­ing chan­nels can and should play. In the con­text of social media specif­i­cal­ly, it may well mean recon­sid­er­ing the role it is play­ing in terms of how con­sumers use it.

From a met­rics and data stand­point, using the real data from the plat­forms them­selves may not imme­di­ate­ly appear to be deliv­er­ing good news in terms of large reach and engage­ment num­bers. But those who base their pro­grams and approach­es on how the world real­ly is must sure­ly stand to gain longer term over those that cling to van­i­ty met­rics that make you feel good but won’t pay the bills in the long run.