A STUDY ON INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON CONSUMER BRAND CHOICE – A Study in Hyderabad City

Companies today have pages on social networks to complement the information held about the products, held by the feedback of consumers about the products and tend to relate more to a company after reading various reviews. The increased demand of internet / online based social media has made it with easy for the people to communicate with hundreds not even the hundreds but also thousands of people to communicate about the product and companies that provide them. In market impact of consumer to consumer communication has greatly been magnified. Social media has become a major factor in influence different aspects of consumer behavior including awareness, information, acquisition, inclination towards a particular brand and real purchase behavior. This study is an attempt to know the influence of social media on consumer brand choice. Since the user of these sites are consumer and every consumer is different, therefore to make use of social media as an effective marketing channel, it is very necessary to know from the marketer’s point of view that how often consumer really use social media for product selection? Do social media marketing and opinions provide by communities actually create brand awareness and really influence the consumer brand choice selection? To answer the research data has been collected through the use of internet, while the primary data has been collected through a questionnaire. The current study focuses on social media impact on consumer brand choice.