Last month, when our social media followers were rapidly filling their carts with Christmas gifts for their loved ones, through our social media poll Vox populi, we checked what their habits were when it comes to product reviews.
To begin with, we wanted to find out if our followers check product or service reviews online before making a purchase. Most of our followers, both on Instagram and LinkedIn, check them out. Almost all respondents on Instagram (96%) believe that reviews in general have a significant influence on consumer purchasing decisions. At the same time, the majority of respondents, 61% of them, claim that reviews are decisive when buying products or services. However, only half of the respondents publish reviews of tried-and-tested products or services.
When it comes to the credibility of reviews, the majority of respondents believe that reviews are mostly credible (84%). At the same time, more than half of our followers on Instagram believe that visual reviews are more reliable compared to text ones. Also, 88% of them trust the reviews of ordinary people more than the reviews of influencers. At the same time, almost all respondents (95%) had more positive experiences after purchasing based on reviews than negative ones.
More than half of respondents find reviews in online forums and groups. They cited Facebook groups such as Ženski recenziraj (en. Women’s Reviews) and Savjeti za uređenje doma (en. Home Decorating Tips) as useful resources. Slightly less than a third of them find reviews from influencers or other content creators, and the least of them find reviews from online stores (14%). We were also interested in how many reviews for one product our respondents look at before making a purchase decision, and most of them claim to look at between one and five reviews (86%).