Social Network Advertising Conversion Rates, Q1 2014 [CHART]

The digital marketing world has been abuzz for months about Facebook’s dialing-down of organic brand content in the average user’s newsfeed—and the declining importance of the “like” or page follow in its wake. But Q1 2014 research by Convertro and AOL Platforms suggests that even if Facebook is doing what it can to push brands from an earned into a paid media model, paid ads on social networks do have better conversion rates than organic content.

On Facebook, the jump in conversion rates among Convertro platform users worldwide was just 0.1 percentage point, but on Twitter, ads were more than twice as likely as organic tweets to convert users. On Pinterest, the situation was reversed, but overall, brands using Convertro saw around a 25% lift in conversions with paid social ads vs. organic social content.

For the most part, though, social media is not the last or only touch for consumers on the path to purchase. According to Convertro’s figures, 87% of interactions with social content were a middle touch, while just over one interaction in 10 was either the last or only touchpoint. Still, some social venues are more geared to. Read the rest at eMarketer.