Research shows social Media is the key to building trust in brands
New research in from Nielsen shows that recommendations from personal acquaintances or opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising.
Ninety percent of consumers surveyed in the latest Nielsen Global Online consumer survey noted that they trust recommendations from people they know, while 70 percent trusted consumer opinions posted online. Nielsen surveyed more than 25,000 internet consumers from 50 countries. To be honest, I don’t find this at all surprising. If you are booking a holiday online, for example, you’ll read the reviews before you book and you can smell one that isn’t genuine a mile off!
This research confirms the value of the approach that we are taking at ItsOpen where we are helping businesses to engage with social media, listening and having conversations with their stakeholders. If you don’t listen to what stakeholders are saying about you in social media networks you can just simply waste money on ads. If your expensive ads are saying one thing and all the blogs are saying something quite different about you, who are your stakeholders going to listen to?
You can read more about the research here.
