A Study on Impact of Social Media Marketing Strategies on Consumer Buying Behaviour

Abstract: This study basically tries to understand how social media marketing actually shapes the way People decide what to buy, especially with how fast digital media is growing in India. Instead Of looking at social media in a broad way, I focused more on the things people see every day Like reels, review videos, influencer posts, ads that pop up while scrolling, and small Engagement activities like polls or Q&A sessions. The idea was to see whether these things really change how people feel about a brand and if it eventually pushes them toward buying something.Problem I Noticed:While observing the online market, I kept seeing a few issues. For example, influencer Marketing has become so common that it’s honestly hard to tell who genuinely likes a Product and who is promoting it just for the collaboration. Another thing is the sheer number Of brands posting similar types of content. Sometimes consumers get confused because all the Posts start looking the same, and the decision becomes less about “Is the product good?” and More about “Is this trending right now?” So I wanted to figure out how much of this actually Affects real buying behaviour. I used a descriptive research design because I mainly wanted to Understand people’s current opinions and behaviour instead of experimenting with anything. In the model, Social Media Marketing Factors were treated as the independent variables. These include the usual things like content type, ads, influencer posts, etc.These factors Influence consumer buying behaviour (the dependent variable), but not directly. They work Through four mediator Brand Awareness, Brand Trust, Engagement, and Purchase Intention. Basically, if someone sees a post, it first makes them aware, then maybe trust develops, then They engage with it, and only after all that they think of actually buying.I collected data using a Google Forms questionnaire. Out of the first 200 responses, only 118 Were actually useful and valid. Most of the respondents were young adults aged 21 30, which Honestly makes sense because they are the most active online. For the analysis, I used Descriptive stats, correlation, and regression/ANOVA to understand the strength of the Relationships. One of the first interesting things that came out was platform usage. Even Though Instagram feels like the most happening app, Facebook still had the highest usage in My sample (39.8%), followed by Instagram (29.4%) and YouTube (24.7%). I didn’t expect Facebook to dominate, but maybe people still use it more quietly for groups, news, or Marketplace. Another part of the study involved testing whether the platform someone uses Affects how effective they think social media marketing is. The p-value was 0.120, which is Higher than 0.05, so statistically, it doesn’t have significance. In simple terms, the type of Platform doesn’t really matter people don’t rate SMM as effective or ineffective based on Whether they use Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

Keywords: Social Media Marketing, Consumer Buying Behaviour, Brand Awareness.