Here at Spring Metrics, we’ve been helping our customers increase their social engagement and we’ve been seeing some noteworthy results. After gathering data for a few months now, we’re able to share some early and surprising figures.

While the public debate about the impact of social media on your online business continues (our data shows they are clearly positively correlated, and the only question should be how much a Like or Follow is worth to your business), many e-commerce merchants and retailers are quietly getting on with the business of adding social media to their toolkit.

Looking at the question from a different perspective, we have seen that catalyzing your following at the time of purchase by enticing buyers to become advocates has increased social engagement, as measured by the total number of Likes, by 23% in an average of six weeks. That’s a stunning result, and we humbly believe only partly due to our product and our awesome support team; the rest is due to simply leveraging the opportunity at the right time, when the visitor is at the point of purchase and feeling good about their decision.

Also captivating is that in early results we’re seeing that more than half of the visitors will Like or Follow, but then not purchase… yet. It’s too early to show stats on how many of those social advocacy actions turn in to purchases at a later date, but we can see that it’s not zero. And looking at the infographic we released today you can see that 54% feel more likely to purchase after Liking. So rather than simply losing the momentum of that visitor after the non-converting visit, you have preserved on average 54% of the time and money you spent attracting that visitor. And of course there’s the indirect effect, again too early to quote stats but it’s not zero either; customers are seeing a clear increase in sales from social media channels.