CHART: Pinterest Has Exploded As An E-Commerce Player, Driving Nearly One-Fourth Of Social Commerce

It wasn't so long ago that Twitter was thought to be a non-starter for retail, and many suspected Pinterest might not drive enough volume, but recent data has shown that they're both driving significant e-commerce traffic. During the second quarter of this year, Pinterest accounted for 23% of social-generated e-commerce sales and Twitter 22%. Facebook's share was slightly higher, at 28%. But a year ago the space looked extremely different. Pinterest was a blip, and accounted for just 2% of social commerce. Facebook dominated with a whopping 55% of social-mediated e-commerce sales.

At BI Intelligence, Business Insider's paid subscription service, we recently analyzed over 15 datasets culled from a variety of sources to probe the viability of social media as a commerce and retail-driver. We published our insights in a recent report, "The New Art Of Social Commerce: How Brands And Retailers Are Converting Tweets, Pins, And Likes Into Sales."

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This data was provided by AddShoppers, which relies on tracking code embedded on thousands of retailers' websites worldwide to determine whether sales revenue can be attributed to a referral from a social media site. In the grand scheme of things, social still represents a small source of direct e-commerce traffic. However, we know that social does play a very important role in multi-touch attribution, as 74% of consumers rely on social networks to guide their purchases, according to Gartner. Facebook may be phasing out physical goods it allows users to purchase via its Gifts service because of poor sales performance, but its ad retargeting platform (FBX) now accounts for more than half of all retargeted ad clicks on the Web. So Facebook clicks are clearly working for some e-retailers. Twitter, on the other hand, recently hired its first head of commerce to figure out a way to let users shop via Tweets. Visual and product-oriented Pinterest is a natural social platform for e-commerce, and its rise in sales attribution is probably correlated to the growth of its user base.

To access BI Intelligence's full report, The New Art Of Social Commerce: How Brands And Retailers Are Converting Tweets, Pins, And Likes Into Sales, sign up for a free trial subscription here. Subscribers also gain access to over 100 in-depth reports on social and mobile, and hundreds of charts and datasets.