Blog Assignment: How social media impact on your purchasing decision

If I had unlimited resources, time and access to information, I would use SNA in order to analyze how social media such as Facebook or Twitter would impact on people’s purchasing decision and how corporations’ products could be sold by social media’s connection especially in terms of e-commerce.

First of all, before presenting its challenge, let me explain about why I am interested in this topic I mentioned at the first paragraph. I have no idea about other countries though in my country japan, there are some influencers who send information throughout social media as well as blogs. It is very interesting that when influencers write their blog about a particular product, its product would be sold extremely by its blog readers. For instance, the book about “crowd sources” published in 2011 is ranked within top 3 on Amazon in 2014 after the book introduced by a famous Japanese blogger.

However, this situation has not applied to Facebook too much. It has been very important to understand that who the most influencers on your Facebook are and how influencers could influence on your purchasing decision. Now I am wondering how companies could use SNA in terms of selling their products? Firstly, we can define what influencers are. They could be a person who has over 1000 connections on Facebook, for example. Secondly, we can find influencers and analyze what kind of products influencers likes. After analyzing, then companies can inform new products of him or her interested in your products in order to expand them to their friends on Facebook. Here these points are data that I need below.

-     - Who can you trust?

-     - Who are your influencers when you make a decision?

-     - Who have mostly valuable information or post valuable information on Facebook?

To be honest, this concept, which a influencer is key factor in marketing strategy, is not new concept anymore though most of companies cannot identify who influencers are on Facebook and it has still difficult to execute this activity because it would take such a long time. Nevertheless, our society tends to be more local, which means that people do not trust mass promotion from companies because they tired of many advertising but people trust people whom they know and they would like to purchase something from people whom they know.

In conclusion, I would use SNA in order to identify and find influencers, and how they could impact on their friends in terms of their purchasing decision.

Shinya Koyama Hult International Business School