Which Social Media Platforms Drive the Most Sales?

Business owners often wonder about the “ROI of social media”. Is my Facebook page actually driving sales? Is all this tweeting really doing anything for my bottom line? Should I be on Pinterest and Instagram?

Well it turns out, when it comes to ecommerce, being social matters.

To better understand how social media is impacting the ecommerce industry, we analyzed data from 37 million social media visits that led to 529,000 orders.

Here’s some interesting data points we uncovered:

• Facebook dominates as a source of social traffic and sales. Nearly two thirds of all social media visits to Shopify stores come from Facebook. Plus, an average of 85% of all orders from social media come from Facebook.
• Orders from Reddit increased 152% in 2013.
• Perhaps most interesting and surprising was community style site Polyvorewhich is generating the highest average order value ahead of Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter. Also noteworthly in this category is Instagram which is also generating higher average orders than those same sites. This is especially impressive considering the only clickable links in Instagram are those in profile bio’s.
• Facebook has the highest conversion rate for all social media ecommerce traffic at 1.85%

In addition to these stats, we’ve also analyzed specific industries to determine which platforms are performing well for them. You can check out all of our findings in the infographic below. Please click on the image to view it in full-screen.