Social media still doesn't drive e-commerce sales: Study

Washington: Despite the frenzy around social media obsession and the red-hot IPOs, they still fail to drive e-commerce sales, a research firm has revealed.

IBM had said that social advertising on sites like Facebook and Twitter had no impact on online Black Friday sales in the last year, and the same is apparently true for this year as well.

According to AllThingsD, IBM tracked traffic and sales at about 800 e-commerce sites, and found that only about one percent of visits to e-commerce sites this week came from social networks.

Strategy director for IBM, Jay Henderson explained that just a fraction of one percent overall order is made by people coming to the e-commerce site directly from a social network.

Henderson said that it is not the implication that social media isn't important, but pointed that so far it hasn't proven effective to driving traffic to the site or directly causing people to convert.

The report said that IBM is tracking referrals from social networks by the so-called 'last click', meaning that a shopper has to be navigating directly from a social network to an e-commerce site, with no other visits in between, for the social network to get counted as the referrer.