“In a recent study of social media usage it is clear that consumers who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to not only recommend, but they are also more likely to buy from those brands than they were before becoming fans/followers. The study of over 1500 consumers by market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower. And an impressive 51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.  Considering Facebook’s over 400 million users, the opportunity is great for social media marketers.”

Possibly the most interesting part of the study was that it found a growing perception of brand being considered “out of touch” if they were not on social media platforms.

At the very least, your brand needs to have an engaging presence on different social media platforms. Even if you aren’t using it strategically, the fact that someone can identify themselves as a fan of yours helps them tell the world who they are. Reap the benefit of that.

Read the entire article here.

For even more analysis, click here.

Sean Silverthorne wrote “Understanding Users of Social Networks” for the Harvard Business Review. He profiles the research of Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski who has years of online social media research under his belt.

Here’s our summary and comment:

•”Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks” So says Piskorski. How do you know what lots of your friends are doing? How do lots of your friends know what you are doing? How can you search for real-time information on a topic? REMEMBER: Google is NOT real-time. How can you have a real relationship with someone without having to commit significant time or resources to make it valuable? There are TONS of ways social media allows us to leverage to achieve what was once impossible. This doesn’t mean that all those achievements are good things. But the more tools we have the better – we are only limited by our imagination and ethics.

Would you offer some more “How could you ________ without social media?” ideas in the comments?

•Pictures are huge in social media platforms. According to this study, 70% of actions in online social communities (except for Twitter) are related to looking at photos. So, reader, how are you going to get more photos associated with how people connect with your brand?

•Myspace? Yes, it still has 70 million folks logging in every month. But this is interesting: “MySpace has a PR problem because its users are in places where they don’t have much contact with people who create news that gets read by others. Other than that, there is really no difference between users of Facebook and MySpace, except they are poorer on MySpace.”

•Social Media must turn to Social Strategy. A couple quick points here. People don’t tend to click on many ads presented in social networks. Further, you shouldn’t expect folks to just use social networks as a way to find a way to click through to your website. What should your brand do in social media? It goes back to point 1: solve failures found in the “real” off-line social world. Do you have customer service issues? A tough time connecting with your clients? Following up after a sale? Market research?

What it is for you?