A recent research report by eMarketer and Morpace found that a Facebook friend referral makes two-thirds of US Facebook users more likely to purchase a product or visit a retailer.  They also found that fan pages are used by 41% of US Facebook users to display their favorite products.  The study also looked at racial and ethnic backgrounds of users and found some interesting statistics.  Read more after the jump.

When discussing fan pages, Morpace found that 37% of people joined a fan page due to coupons and discounts.  The study didn`t talk about social games, but anecdotally we`ve seen that type of behavior in social games as well, where most social games offer prizes to players to sign up as a fan.  The criticism of the practice is that fans who sign up for that reason aren`t really `fans`of a brand, but this study in fact finds the opposite, because friends are far more likely to engage with a product (or likely a game) if a friend is already a fan, regardless of the reason. Morpace also found that users were fans of an average of nine pages.

Morpace looked at how different racial and ethnic groups interacted with fans, and found that white Facebook users were least likely to become a fan of brands and retailers.  The study, which didn`t indicate it`s survey sample size, also found that “Hispanics had the greatest propensity to become fans in all the categories studied by Morpace. One-half of Hispanic respondents said Facebook was a good tool for researching new products, compared with 46% of Asians, 44% of African-Americans and only 31% of whites.”