Technorati, the famous, decade-old blog search engine and blog portal, has released its 2013 Digital Influence Report, which replaces the historical State of the Blogosphere report and deals a lot more with branding and social media marketing. You can download the full PDF here, it’s an interesting read as usual.
We want to highlight one aspect which the Technorati report uncovers and which we find quite fascinating: On page 16 Technorati published a diagram showing which online services are most and least likely to influence online purchases (in the U.S.). The top spot goes to retail sites, where the likelihood that they influence a purchase for obvious reasons is very high, 56 percent. Brand sites do also influence people’s buying behaviour with 34 percent. But close behind, with 31,1 percent, come blogs. In other words: Blogs influence purchases on the web more than Facebook (30,8 percent), YouTube (27 percent) or Twitter (only 8 percent).
That is quite an astonishing result and proves once again the power of blogs.
Because of the relevance that blogs do have when people make purchasing decisions, the distribution of brands’ social marketing budgets doesn’t seem to follow any logic, as pointed out by Patrick Lambert on his blog. He highlights another chart from the Technorati report that shows the social budget breakdown of brands. The main share of brands’ social budget is being pumped into Facebook campaigns: 56 percent. YouTube and Twitter each get 13 percent of the total money spent on social media marketing, and only 6 percent are being put to use on blogs.
So while blogs have a bigger impact on purchasing decisions than Facebook, they only get a fraction of the brands’ advertising dollars.
That obviously doesn’t make sense, and it presents a big opportunity for all companies and brands that understand the power and relevance of blogs in the social media marketing mix.
All that means that 2013 could be the year when blogs get back into the brands’ focus. According to the statistics above, they should.