Social media sites have become a large source of shopping traffic for online retailers. In case you are unfamiliar with Pinterest it is a virtual pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, recipes, and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, “re-pin” images to their own pinboards, or “like” photos.

At this point, most marketers know Pinterest creates a huge amount of Internet referral traffic. It recently surpassed Yahoo to become the fourth largest drive of traffic in the world. But how much traffic does Pinterest bring and what does that mean for your business?

RichRelevance, a specialist in e-commerce personalization, recently analyzed more than 689 million shopping sessions that took place between January 1 and August 31, 2012 to benchmark the performance of Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest as drivers of traffic to retail sites.

The study shows, while Facebook generates the most shopping sessions, Pinterest is gaining the lead quickly.

A few key findings:

• Facebook is responsible for 86 percent of social referrals, ahead of Pinterest (11 percent) and Twitter (three percent).
• Facebook users generated 2.5 times as many page views as Twitter and almost twice as many as Pinterest.
• Pinterest is nearly doubling revenue per session compared to other social channels. While shoppers who come to retail sites from Facebook and Twitter purchase more often, Pinterest users spend more than either ($168.83 average order value versus $94.70 for Facebook and $70.84 for Twitter).

Shoppers who enter retail sites from Facebook browse more pages and make more total purchases; however shoppers driven to those sites via Pinterest spend more money.

BizRate Insights also did a survey which suggests a large number of Pinterest users sign up for the service with real shopping in mind. They asked 1,248 Pinterest users and 4,738 Facebook users how they used their network of choice. Most questions were about shopping and brand engagement.

Some interesting findings:

• Sixty-nine percent of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they’ve purchased or wanted to purchase as compared to only 40 percent of online consumers who visit Facebook.
• Forty-three percent of Pinterest members agree they use Pinterest to “associate with retailers or brands with which I identify,” compared to just 24 percent of Facebook users who agree to the same use with Facebook.
• Thirty-nine percent of Pinterest users look for special offers from retailers and brands.

The traffic potential alone makes Pinterest an interesting prospect for business with social intentions. If you have compelling images that entice people to “pin” your products and other people to click on those pins, that’s how you can start to drive traffic to your site and make money.

If you’re not already on the Pinterest bandwagon, hop on soon. It’s the first social network delivering traffic, real revenue, and new customers.

For those distributors in the print industry who want to deliver new ideas to their customers, Pinterest could add real value to the marketing plans of customers by delivering traffic and revenue to help CMO’s reach their ROI goals.

Could your free time be more productively spent on Pinterest than on the world’s biggest social networks? How could your customers utilize Pinterest? Do you have any customer examples to share?