Blogs Surpass Social Networks for Consumer Influence

Every CMO aims to figure out how the best influence potential costumers. Technorati's 2013 Digital Influence Report may help making up your mind. 

The report underlines that: "Sixty percent of brand marketers predict an average increase of 40% in social spend for 2013." Currently the bulk of digital spend goes to display advertising, search & video with social spend making only 10% of online marketing budgets. Most of social spend goes evidently to social networks leaving only small budgets for blogs & influencers. 

Even though blogs and influencers don't get a large portion of brands’ digital spend yet, "they rank high with consumers for trust, popularity and influence." Consumers, when making purchase decisions rely on blogs as "most trustworthy source of information" above social networks.

The report clearly points out the importance of blogs for costumers for making a purchase decision.
For instance, according to consumers, blogs are more influential in shaping opinion than Twitter, and when it comes to affecting purchase decisions,more important than Facebook. According to the research results: "With regard to overall sources for information on the internet, blogs rank among the top five “most trustworthy” sources."

The survey findings also indicate that many of those consumers are turning to blogs when looking to make a purchase. Blogs were found to be the third-most influential digital resource (31%) when making overall purchases. In fact, blogs were found to be the fifth-most trustworthy source overall for information on the internet.

In short, where brands are spending is not fully aligned with how and where consumers are seeing value and being influenced. This has much to do with an essential hurdle faced by most content creators: a lack of metrics and the fragmentation that leads to their complexity as a purchasable medium.

As  Patricia Redsicker from Social Media Examiner smartly points out, "the biggest takeaway from the Technorati report is that blogging cultivates community where influence is birthed". Since marketers always tend to reach larger masses they miss the issue based nature of smaller but more influential communities.

What do you think about this research? Will it help spreading the word about the importance of vertical communities in purchase decisions?

Read the full report here.