IMPACT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON CONSUMER BUYING DECISION TOWARDS FINANCIAL ASSETS AMONG IT PROFESSIONALS AT KERALA

We are living in a highly digitized world. The way customers communicate with financial institutions has changed tremendously. With advancements in digital communications, the customers, especially from Generation Y, would like to communicate with financial institutions through digital channels. Social media is a technological platform to share pictures, videos, ideas, news etc. between like-minded people. Social media is spreading very fast among the people and no organizations cannot ignore the power of social media in its marketing efforts. The rate of time required to spread information about the company through social media is much higher than any other forms of marketing communication. This paper attempted to analyze the influence of social media in the buying behavior towards financial assets among IT professionals in Kerala. A structured questionnaire by way of the survey was collected from 403 professionals working in Information Technology Industry. A probability sampling of stratified random sampling was done. The study concluded that social media significantly influence the purchase decisions of even high involvement products like financial products.