The research of over 1,000 parents by Different Sized Feet, the family unit of word-of-mouth agency 1000heads, revealed 26% of parents favoured offline conversations with friends, 18% offline conversations with partners, 7% advertising and 1% social networks.

The research also found that parents are spending 14 hours a week of personal time on the web, with six of these hours on social networks.

The research found that while 24% of parents had visited a special interest blog and 21% a special-interest forum, only 11% had visited a parenting site and 14% a parenting forum, suggesting parenting sites are half as influential as other niche-interest community sites.

Carrie Grafham, who led the Different Sized Feet team, said while social media wasn’t deemed influential, brands could harness the wide use of it to then power offline conversation.

“What a lot of brands are doing is using social networks to nurture core fans and they will then of course talk offline, it is not a complete waste of time.” said Grafham.

According to the research, other types of sites regularly visited by parents included shopping or auction sites (44.5%), video sites such as YouTube (28%), online media players (26.5%) and money saving and group deal sites (21%). Brand sites were only visited by 12% of parents regularly.