“Nobody wants to be sold to when hanging out on social media” is a popular statement in marketing and ecommerce.

When you think about it, it makes sense: social media is a place to connect with people and share opinions about topics that matter to you.

You want to be social, not look at a stream of promotional posts.

However, the data speaks differently.

When we first talked about social commerce, we mentioned the insanely fast-growing share of mobile usage in ecommerce.

But it gets even better.

Research from eMarketer shows that just over one-third of social media users have never purchased an item through social media. For those that have, Facebook seems to be the preferred platform, followed by Instagram and YouTube:

In fact, social commerce is at a point where we’re even able to assign an average order value to each of the channels. Even better, we can tailor our social media strategy based on it.