Brands that can unite their activities in social media with paid-for search advertising usually enjoy a broad assortment of benefits as,according to a new study by GroupM Search and comScore.
The Influenced: Social Media, Search and the Interplay of Consideration and Consumption report released recently studies the interaction between consumers and brands on the web, with a focus on three specific forms of internet content.
These were paid-for search, social media relevant to a product category - such as consumer reviews or blog posts - and "influenced social media", defined as sites containing "distributed social marketing content of a brand's social media activities."
Consumers who use social media were found to be 1.7 times more likely to "search with the intention of making a list of brands or products to consider purchasing" than the average web user.
Some 50% of people who were exposed to both social media and paid-for listings also searched for broad category terms every day, compared with a mean score of 33% among "non-exposed searchers".
Moreover, clickthrough rates on search ads increased by 50% when netizens had consumed both "influenced social media" and paid-for listings.
Members of this demographic also sought out information for particular brands with almost three times the frequency of those who only saw paid-for ads on sites such as Google and Ask.
When this group entered brand-specific enquiries on such portals, their clickthrough rates on search ads reached 11.8%, compared with a norm of 4.5%.
These users typically spend a total of 170 minutes a day surfing the web, compared with an overall average of 65 minutes, and are also extremely regular visitors to search platforms.
Paid-search alone delivered a 23% uptick in consumer penetration - or the "measurement of consumers who might use a search term" - with regard to brand-related queries, the study added.
When people viewed social media relevant to a category and paid search, this figure rose by an extra 15%, with a combination of "influenced social media" and paid-for listings driving totals up by a further 42%.
Consumers who had been "exposed to a brand's social marketing campaign" were also 2.4 times more likely to click on an "organic" link leading to an advertiser's website than an average user seeing a paid-for search ad.
