IT Buyers Use Social Media Without Realising It

While most people deny getting business information from social networks, on closer examination a lot of their buying decisions are shaped by social sources on the web, according to research to be published by eWEEK Europe UK.

Social media are so transparent that people do not realise they are using them, according to a survey of 500 IT decision makers in Europe, carried out by the newly-launched research division of publisher Net Media Europe.

Facebook is a B2B information source

When asked, only 12 percent of people buying IT equipment said they use social media to inform their choices – saying they preferred to get infmation from experts and advisors. However, on closer examination they are accessing these experts through social media forums.

“At least double this number are heavy users of social media and make use of it in ways which support their IT decisions,” said Net Media Europe research director Camelia Nita. “It is possible that the very transparency and ease of use of social media has masked the extent to which people use them.”

As the use of social media evolves in the enterprise, the IT decision makerr is emerging as a ‘customer 3.0’, the report found, and new types of collaboration are changing enterprise IT purchasing habits.

The fact that one in eight IT decision makers consciously uses social media for purchasing, and one in four uses them as a support tool, is a big change, given that the use of social media was all but  prohibited from general use in companies a few years ago.

The report also found that IT decision makers rate Facebook higher than LinkedIn as a source of business-to-business information, with 73 percent of the corporate respondents rating it highly, compared with only 45 percent using Linkedin, and less than 40 percent who said they used Twitter.

More than half the sample said they use social media tools, in different guises, including communicating and collaborating through blogs, chatrooms, forums, orusing multimedia/video tools. Of these tools, communication and collaboration are used by half of IT professionals, while multimedia tools are were used by one third.

For a copy of the whole report contact info@netmediaeurope.com.