Facebook has its Gifts, and Chirpify today extended its Twitter in-stream purchasing to include Instagram: social commerce is definitely on the rise when it comes to new services. But a report out today from Eventbrite shows that social commerce is also growing in another sense: people are sharing their activities more than ever, and it’s having a direct impact on the bottom line.
Using data from its own Eventbrite network, which sends out invitations and offers people a way to buy tickets for specific events, here is what the company found:
The company says that “Dollars Per Share”, a metric that calculates how many purchases result from a person sharing details of something bought or desired, has nearly doubled in the last two years. Overall, the average DPS was up by 81% to $3.23 from $1.78.
Within that, some interesting differences among the social networks:
— Twitter rose by the most — up 330% (!) — although it’s still below the average DPS. It is now at $1.85 per share, up from only $0.43 two years ago. That shows that Twitter is indeed becoming more of a place where people talk about commerce.
— Facebook rose by a smaller amount but is still the main social commerce sharing platform. Its DPS is now at $4.15 from $2.52, a rise of 65%.
— LinkedIn is the least successful in this context. Its DPS is at $0.92, only 2% up from the $0.90 it brought in two years ago. That’s a sign of how LinkedIn, despite its efforts, is still not managing to get people to use it for more than making direct contact with people, either for jobs or other work-related networking. However, it should be pointed out that in countries where LinkedIn is used more for this, it’s used very well indeed: DPS on LinkedIn in France was $12.56, the highest-value country for the network. LinkedIn DPS values in the Netherlands and Italy were $3.33 and $3.21, respectively.
The other area that Eventbrite considered was Visits Per Share (VPS). These are less directly linked to buying than DPS, but they do also indicate more engagement, which eventually could be used to convert an interested person into a customer. Again, the numbers indicate that Twitter is a light and effective sharing machine:
— Twitter drove 33 Visits Per Share, the highest of the three sites.
— Facebook, interestingly did about half as well, with 14 visits back to Eventbrite, up from 11 in 2010.
— LinkedIn again scored the lowest: it drove only 10 visits on average for every link that gets shared on its network.\
What to make of the differences? I think that some of it might have to do with how much information you get in a service: with Twitter, the 140-character limit means that you have to click through in order to get more information. Facebook, however, offers posters the chance to load in quite a bit of detail: that means less need to click through to see if you are interested in attending something. As for LinkedIn… it’s quite possibly the case, as with the DPS metric, that it’s just not thought of as much in connection with this kind of information sharing activity.
Eventbrite also looked at social commerce on a country-by-country basis, and some interesting standout details emerged:
— Italians share the most, with 14% of all users sharing events. British people, it turns out, click on links the most. They appear to be beating the average on Facebook, for example, where, when a person posts an Eventbrite event, 22 contacts will click on the link.
— Canada came out as the country with the highest Dollars Per Share metric, scoring above average on Facebook ($4.51) and on Twitter ($2.97). Canadians, it seems, are very keen when it comes to social commerce: even LinkedIn drove $3.13 per share among Canadians.