VWO’s study

A case study done by VWO revealed that removing social share buttons increased conversions by 11.9%. But that’s one of those things that you should definitely test. It will depend on your audience.

Some nuance by members

One of the members of my Ecom Convert group mentioned that they’re getting a lot of PInterest shares from having those icons there.

Removing my social media shares was one of your recommendations for me. But like this I get a lot of pins. My target audience is moms…moms pin

Someone else pitched in with a similar thought:

I think the usefulness is dictated by the audience. I get notifications daily that someone pinned a product or re-pinned one of my pins, but my target demographic is older, wealthy women and a good percentage of them pin.

A single social share icon

On CottonMills’ site, there is an alternative to showing the social media share icons: a single social share icon. However, it might not be such a great idea:

I’m “computery” and would not use that because I don’t know what it means. I want to see the red Pinterest icon and the action that I want is for that button to pin the item to one of my boards.

I think for any brand it can be valuable. Even my husband, who is all “manly man”, using Pinterest to save ideas for motorcycles because he doesn’t have other social media at all. My clients use Pinterest feverishly, because they are event planners and they are saving style and product ideas. People into fashion would save clothing and outfit ideas. Architects would save photos of awesome staircases etc. i personally don’t live on Pinterest but my conversions from Pinterest far outpace all other social platforms.

Folks save things for decorating ideas. So if they’re not ready to convert, they’re saving to their own wishlist. Added bonus: their wishlist is public and everyone can see them. Then people “Re-Pin” that person’s pin and then you have multiples of eyeballs on your product that links to your page.

Thoughts from a PInterest expert

The highest organic traffic for ecom stores will be coming from your visitors pinning your products and Google (if you have good SEO in place). Pinterest and Google (plus YouTube) do very together as the top 3 largest search engines. Once you see this happening, you need to devise a plan to scale and leverage. I recently worked in a Pinterest account for a large fashion brand in L.A. They get 7.5 million monthly views on Pinterest that is happening mostly from their shoppers pinning (doing the marketing for them).

Pinterest will be the main action people will use when they are not ready to buy yet (women and men). Only 3% are ready to buy now but 47% will buy later. The Pinterest pin-it button is an absolute necessity. The other social shares are not as important but every store needs to watch their share counts through their social icons to find out.

One of my clients sells mostly man stuff in his ecom store. We just sold a $300 pocket knife through a pin. Men do use the platform, but more importantly, women buy for their men (themselves, and everyone on their list). Women are shoppers and not just for themselves. They are also planners. Future purchases are saved in boards (pins) for later. Pinterest will bring in free traffic for all demographics.

Type your domain name in the Pinterest search bar or go to the ‘activity’ area under ‘community’ in your Pinterest profile to see if people are pinning from your store. Check your Google Analytics to see even more.