Forty per cent of social media users have bought a product after favouriting or sharing it on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, according to a study by Vision Critical.
Facebook was found to drive most users to purchase while the data showed, somewhat surprisingly, that customers were as likely to make the purchase in-store as online.
Vice-president of social media at Vision Critical told Forbes: “One of the more surprising findings in this whole research for me was to see how significant that in-store purchasing is. This is one of those really not intuitive findings.
“And just that recognition that you are not getting the whole story on social from tracking social to e-commerce conversions is a huge finding.
“If you are estimating the ROI on social by looking at social to web, you are missing roughly half your social-inspired purchasing.”
Almost 6,000 social media users contributed to the research.