YouTube Converts More Customers Than All Other Social Networks [STUDY]

VentureBeat reports that, when it comes to paid advertising on social media platforms, YouTube is king.

YouTube is the clear winner in a few key areas compared to other social platforms, including introducing new products to customers, and helping consumers make purchasing decisions. The information was taken from a new study Aol Platforms released today.

The report looked at data found within 500 million clicks and 15 million conversions during the first quarter of 2014. Social purchase interactions were tracked through Convertro’s attribution technology. This then determined which platforms had affected online sales and at what point in the purchasing decision they had influence on the consumer.

Jeff Zwelling, CEO and co-founder at Convertro told VentureBeat:

We believe that YouTube does well in both of these important purchase funnel areas for a number of reasons. YouTube’s own search volume and preferential positioning on Google’s results help drive large amounts of traffic, of course. But when you get to YouTube, the content is rich, descriptive, and usually helpful.

I’ve done this myself. I recently bought a coffee machine. I had the decision down to three alternatives and couldn’t decide which one was best for me. In the end, I watched videos on YouTube of people using all three machines and chose the one that matched my idea of a good coffee maker.

There are There are multiple stages of the online purchasing cycle where social platforms come into play:

• First stage: Being introduced to a product via social media is considered the ‘first’ stage of the purchasing decision.
• Middle stage: The ‘middle’ of the buying cycle is where consumers are exposed to may see re-targeting ads that drive them back to the product they were originally looking at.
• Last stage: In the ‘last stage, consumers will often go out of their way to search for the product they’ve been introduced to in the first stage or the product that has been retargeted to them in the middle stage. At this point the customer is ready to buy.

It’s important to note that these stages aren’t followed in order, purchases are made at all stages of the process.

The study from Aol Platforms’ concludes that YouTube is strongest at both introducing new products and helping to close sales. Facebook is the second best platform in those areas, with Google+ coming in third place.

Twitter was found to be the worst platform for product introductions, nine times less effective than YouTube. It is also the worst platform for closing sales, but interestingly enough it performs incredibly well during the middle phase.

However, if you pay for sponsored tweets on Twitter, then those tweets will be 30 times more likely to lead to a direct purchase, and over five times more likely to introduce a new product to a customer. Promoting tweets also help to boost the conversion rate up to three times more than the conversion rate of organic tweets.

For more information, you can download the full study right here.