Written By: Somesh Khandalkar
The battle between the two social networking giants is about to get intense. While Facebook stands tall with its billion figure user base, Pinterest (around 25 million users) has managed to deliver ROI as reports suggest 62% of Pinterest users follow and repin retailers as compared to only 17% of Facebook users who say they use Facebook for purchase inspiration.
Let’s digest some statistics first:
Bottica.com conducted a study of behaviour of Facebook and Pinterest followers and published an infographic revealing some interesting statistics:
Pinterest users spend $180 as compared to Facebook users' $85.
Pinterest influences 10 percent of transactions, while Facebook only influences 7 percent.
Pinterest users visit 44 percent fewer pages on the social pinboard than Facebook users do on Facebook.
Pinterest has a 51 percent lower conversion rate than Facebook.
Pinterest certainly has impressed marketers when it comes to ROI. The question whether Facebook inspires purchase hasn’t really been answered. And Facebook has its other woes such as the question of mobile ad revenues. More than 50% of Facebook’s user accesses it via mobiles and Facebook is trying hard to crack the code of mobile ad revenue and the recent effort was the launch of mobile newsfeed ads.
May be the perception of how people view Pinterest is different, primarily because of its structure and function. Users there are more comfortable with the idea of businesses trying to drive sales. Whereas it seems it is the opposite in Facebook’s case as not many good things are being said about F-commerce.
However, Facebook recently made a strategic move by announcing ‘Collection’ a soon to be launched feature that will allow users to add stuff they like to their wishlist or even buy if they would want to. This feature will certainly be most welcomed by marketers who would now have more opportunities to drive sales.
Pinterest on the other hand announced on Nov 14 2012 that it is now open for Businesses. It’s a great move by Pinterest to counteract the upcoming competition from ‘collections’ feature of Facebook. With this move Pinterest has opened up more avenues for business to drive more traffic and sales. It also strengthens Pinterest’s position as social network that is business friendly.
Amidst all this when Facebook was facing criticism from page owners regarding decreasing reach, Facebook announced that it will roll out ‘Pages feed’ a separate section where a user can see all the updates from the all the pages he/she has liked. Clearly, Facebook wants to please marketers and it is leaving no stone unturned to do that.
Final Thoughts
Pinterest seems to be in a mood for serious competition and is leveraging its business friendly positioning in the market. One thing that it needs is growth in markets outside US. Facebook on the other hand has a massive user base which is enough to keep marketers attracted but it needs to answer some ROI questions convincingly and quickly.
As far the brands are concerned, they have no option to choose between these two. They need Facebook for the reach and Pinterest for ROI.
About the Author: Somesh is a social media blogger and currently Social Media Head of Gozoop, Dubai. He loves blogging, movies and surfing the internet for interesting news and updates. He also maintains a social media blog http://sovedo.com/