Blogs Outweigh Social Nets on Purchase Help: Jupiter

When it comes to influencing sales conversions, blog posts can have a greater impact on customer buying decisions than marketing messages delivered via social networks, according to a new study.

Blogs and blog posts can replace the one-way spread of online information with a conversational model that encourages greater engagement and may carry more authority on subjects such as what products and services to consider or buy across a number of categories, according to the study from Jupiter Research and social media analysis company Buzzlogic.

Researchers found that 50% of the blog readers among the more than 2,000 U.S. online consumers polled said they find blogs useful for purchase information. As expected, technologies and gadgets are the product categories most often researched in this way; 23% of respondents said they’d found useful consumer electronics data from blogs, and 20% said the same about computer hardware and software products.

Other categories where respondents looked to blogs for advice included media and entertainment (15%), games, toys or sporting goods (14%), travel (12%), automotive (11%) and health (10%).

Both overall blog readers and frequent ones—those who read more than one blog at least once a month—said they trust relevant blog content for purchase information more than they do the content from social networking sites.

In the trust hierarchy, both groups said they were most likely to base purchase decisions on reader comments to blog posts (14% for overall, 18% for frequent), a niche blog covering a specific product or service of interest (11% and 15% respectively), or a blog written by a professional in the field (10% and 14%). information gathered from social network sites ranked lower than any of those groups for purchase trust (7% and 10%).

But overall blog readers aren’t as responsive to ads in blogs as their frequent-reader counterparts. About half of readers who check blogs more than once a month said they have taken some kind of action as a results of seeing such an ad, compared to only 40% of blog readers overall.

Most of those actions were referrals of assorted kinds. Nearly a quarter of frequent readers were prompted to read an online review of a product or service by seeing a blog ad, compared to 17% of overall blog readers. And 20% of frequent readers were led to visit the official Web site for a product or service because of a blog ad, compared to 16% of readers overall.

The Jupiter/ Buzzlogic survey also found blogs’ influence kicking in at points very close to the purchase decision. Seventeen percent of blog readers said they used a blog to help them find out about products and services, while 19% said they used blog content to compare similar products. One in five overall blog readers said they use blogs to compare specific brands, check pricing and decide on a purchase.

That last figure rose to 28% for frequent blog readers and to 52% for all respondents who said they had been influenced in a purchase decision by a blog.

How many online customers read blogs? About one half of the online population, according to Jupiter’s findings: 47% of online consumers have read a blog in the past 12 months. But one-fifth of those read less than one blog a month; only about 27% of online consumers read a blog once a month or more. Three percent read a blog daily, and another 3% read one multiple times a day.

The study, “Harnessing the Power of Blogs,” was fielded in August 2008.