Facebook is five times more likely to drive sales than Pinterest

by Stratton Craig

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The wide range of social networking sites available can cause confusion among communications as to which is the best vehicle for communicating with their audience. Social sites vary in terms of purpose and average user profile, so the choice of platform depends on what a company is looking for, marketing and media website The Drum reports.
Retailers, apparently, should stick to Facebook, according to a new study from customer data platform QuBit. The research finds that consumers who connect to brands on Facebook are five times more likely to engage in a purchase, compared to Pinterest users.
The study, which examined traffic to transactional websites coming from social platforms, found that a typical purchase follows a series of visits to various sources, including social and non-social sites. In addition, data suggests that relying on social sources takes three times longer to lead to a purchase decision than non-social sites.
Graham Cooke, CEO of QuBit, comments that while the value of social as a marketing channel is indisputable, it has to be properly understood to work well. In fact, the latest study suggests that the ways of measuring the impact of social sites might be “flawed”. Furthermore, the findings point to the fact that those criticising Facebook as an advertising channel might have been wrong, he adds.