Win­ter is com­ing. And one of the chan­nels brands will be look­ing to lever­age to raise aware­ness over the hol­i­day shop­ping sea­son will be social shop­ping. Social shar­ing plat­forms such as Pin­ter­est, Polyvore, Houzz, and Wane­lo can be pow­er­ful tools to link togeth­er con­sumer pur­chase cycles, and enable con­sumers to dis­cov­er prod­ucts and ser­vices.

A new study by Dat­aPop and Ken­shoo on social com­merce has iden­ti­fied a num­ber of best prac­tices for brands to dri­ve engage­ment and increase the vis­i­bil­i­ty of their prod­ucts on social shar­ing sites such as Pin­ter­est.

The find­ings were very pos­i­tive from a brand per­spec­tive. Accord­ing to the report, social com­merce has expe­ri­enced a 60 per­cent year-on-year rise in attrib­ut­able rev­enues (poten­tial­ly even greater when fac­tor­ing the impact of social com­merce on offline sales). It explains why 42 per­cent of retail­ers are already devot­ing resource to social com­merce in what is fast becom­ing a fierce and com­pet­i­tive play­ing field for brands to get their mes­sages across.

Dat­aPop and Ken­shoo Social Com­merce Study also pro­vid­ed data on the best per­form­ing brands on social com­merce plat­forms.

The sec­ond edi­tion of the annu­al Social Com­merce Index also revealed that 70 per­cent of the most engag­ing Pins on Pin­ter­est are prod­uct-relat­ed, and that Rich Pins dri­ve 20 per­cent high­er engage­ment than stan­dard Pins.

3 Ways Marketers Can Help Drive More Sales From Pinterest

Above all, the 2014 Social Com­merce Index revealed three key Pin­ter­est mar­ket­ing find­ings use­ful for retail brands:

1. Opti­miz­ing Pin descrip­tions with prod­uct attrib­ut­es (type, size, col­or, etc.) dra­mat­i­cal­ly boosts impres­sions: It’s well estab­lished that con­sumers use Pin­ter­est to research and be inspired. Use­ful tags to help con­sumers find con­tent and prod­ucts they are inter­est­ed as they are search­ing dra­mat­i­cal­ly boosts the num­ber of impres­sions.
2. Prod­uct posts have the high­est lev­els of engage­ments: With more than 70 per­cent of the most engag­ing Pins on Pin­ter­est being prod­uct relat­ed, brands should feel a great deal of encour­age­ment to step up their efforts on the chan­nel. How­ev­er, make sure you con­form to the aes­thet­ics of the medi­um – the study found that prod­uct images that don’t use a plain white back­ground gen­er­ate 159 per­cent more likes and re-pins.
3. Depth and rich­ness of con­tent dri­ves engage­ment: Rich Pins dri­ve 20 per­cent more engage­ment, how­ev­er brands aren’t yet ful­ly uti­liz­ing the fea­ture. More than 60 per­cent of over­all Pins on Pin­ter­est still aren’t employ­ing Rich Pin func­tion­al­i­ty.

Tying Together Purchase Journeys For The Winter Shopping Season

Social com­merce has proven to be fan­tas­ti­cal­ly pow­er­ful in the build­ing aware­ness and con­sid­er­a­tion stages of the con­sumer pur­chase jour­ney. It also pro­vides con­sumers with ear­ly reas­sur­ance about one’s brand and prod­ucts. With the cru­cial win­ter shop­ping sea­son ahead, it’s imper­a­tive that brands ensure they are vis­i­ble and com­ing across pos­i­tive­ly as a means of aid­ing healthy rev­enues in the bot­tom lev­els of brand pur­chase fun­nels.

As Chris­tine Bensen, SVP of Media at iCross­ing explains “social com­merce [is gain­ing] recog­ni­tion for its effec­tive­ness, [and] more and more retail­ers will rush to cap­i­tal­ize on the oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

Improving Social Commerce Analytics

As the social com­merce space con­tin­ues to become more estab­lished, it will become inevitable that addi­tion­al adver­tis­ing and organ­ic fea­tures will be imple­ment­ed by brands oper­at­ing on the plat­forms, com­ple­ment­ed by an increase in the lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion in ana­lyt­ics.

Pin­ter­est has already launched Pro­mot­ed Pins to help adver­tis­ers mea­sure their per­for­mance, and Polyvore and Wane­lo are also work­ing on enhanced ana­lyt­ics fea­tures for enter­prise brands.

Undoubt­ed­ly, the emerg­ing social com­merce plat­forms will be a com­pet­i­tive bat­tle­ground for brands for years to come.

You can down­load Dat­aPop and Ken­shoo full Social Com­merce Index report here.