Social media made me buy it: The impact of social media on consumer purchase behavior

Over the last few years, social media has completely changed businesses' marketing strategy, it is a great feedback source enabling prospects to communicate with companies and connect consumers so they share their experiences, knowledge and opinions with each other. The purpose of this paper is to research empirically, the impact of social media on the purchasing behavior of consumers, and especially on how the feedbacks and reviews influence each of the stages of the consumer decision making process, a sample of 828 randomly selected, Moroccan social media users, was investigated through a survey. The results show that consumers' purchasing decision is highly influenced by social media networks. According to the results, the influence of social media on information and evaluation of alternatives stages is higher than the rest of the stages of the purchase decision making process. Finally, almost most of the survey respondents (85, 4 %) believe that social media has an impact on our purchasing behavior.