If you looked for reasons why should you brand your online business on the social media besides SEO and traffic purposes, this next study is for you. People from all age groups engage more with familiar brands fan pages, frequently and also recommend (“Like”) them more.

The study is divided to age groups and shows that younger people are much more interactive with the social media, However older age groups increases gradually their activity on the social media, consequently, making it important to brand online businesses towards them also. Let’s go over the study’s findings.

Attitudes Towards Brands

44.5% from all the survey participants (52.8% from the younger age group and 36.2% from the older age group) like to visit brand pages on the social media sites- This means that almost half of the people are looking for brands on social networks! Additionally, about 25% of the participants (33.4% from the younger age group and 17.4% from the older age group) like the brand more when they see it on the social media- Meaning quarter of the people trust brands more when they see it on social networks.

However it appears that many brands annoy people. About 27% (30.5% from the younger age group and 24.7% from the older age group) find brands on the social media annoying- I am guessing it is because of too many posts, messages and invites.

Frequency Interacting With Brands

The interaction frequency of people with brands they like is also very high: About 45% of the participants (50.2% from the younger age group and 39.3% from the older age group) are interacting with familiar brands they like at least once a week, 20% of the people (23.5% from the younger age group and 17% from the older age group) are doing it on a daily basis.

“Liking” Familiar Brands On Facebook

According the latest poll (April 2011), About 59% of all 18+ years of age are “Liking” brands on Facebook. We can see that over the year and a half the polls were conducted (September 2010-April 2011), the level of positive engaging with familiar brands has increased by 12%.

Work From Home Conclusions

1.  It is very clear and obvious that older age groups are less active with brands in the social media and less active in the social media in general. However, they are closing the gap and become significant population to address. There were similar conclusions in my Who’s Using Social Networks post.

2.  To market effectively on the social media, don’t overwhelm people with too much content, many find it annoying!

3.  Familiar strong brands receives much more traffic from social networks which eventually will also affect their search rankings. Big reason to work on strengthening your work at home brand.

4.  Another reason to work on your brand strength is that familiar brands have higher probability to get positive reaction (“Like”, “Tweet”, “+1”, etc.) and consequently be exposed to wider audience.