Hi Jo. Just to clarify, Pinterest became our biggest social referrer last year, overtaking Facebook for the first time. Facebook has actually reduced its share in terms of referrals to Folksy (ie the number of people it brings to the site) but is still by far the best social media channel in terms of conversion (ie Facebook leads to more sales than any of the other social channels).
Where Pinterest struggles is converting into sales, which is probably due to two reasons:
- most pins are “evergreen” meaning they don’t disappear and keep getting repinned long after they were originally listed, so lots of visitors from Pinterest are landing on sold-out items or empty shops
- about 60% of Pinterest users are in the US, but many shops on Folksy don’t ship to the US, so those visits can’t convert into sales.
I do totally understand your reservations about people using Pinterest for “inspiration” and copying designs, but the amount of traffic it brings to Folksy is HUGE (just under 540k visits from Pinterest in 2016 - up from 290k in 2015!). And these are all people actually clicking on the pins, not just repinning them. It’s a massive source of traffic and potential sales, it’s just about how we (and you) can convert all those visits into sales.
We don’t have the stats to show comparisons for Instagram between 2015 and 2016, because our analytics only started tracking Instagram in October 2015, but it is definitely on the increase.
Visits from Twitter were actually down in 2016 but strangely sales from Twitter were up by 21%. So although not as many people came to Folksy from Twitter, more of these people bought something. We’re not quite sure why that is, so we need to do some more digging here.