Adobe's first Social Media Intelligence report reveals Twitter's revenue per visitor has quadrupled in the year to September 2013, while the figure for Pinterest also shows strong growth at 150 per cent. Pinterest now makes 55 cents (34p) per visitor.
Facebook, the third site monitored by Adobe's report, has experienced more modest growth at 39 per cent, but receives the highest income per visitor out of the three at 93 cents (58p).
Facebook dominates the share of social referrals to retail sites, dwarfing other social media sites with a 62 per cent share, although this had fallen by 15 percentage points.
Although less than 10 per cent of retail site referrals came from Twitter, the site has more than trebled its share over the year, to 6.8 per cent from 1.9 per cent.
Facebook's cost-per-click rate has dropped by 40 percent, while the click-through-rate for advertising has soared by 275 percent.
Adobe's analysis was part of its quarterly Digital Index reports. It uses data across retail, media, entertainment, and travel websites worldwide, covering 400 million unique visitors to social networking sites.
The data on paid social was collected from more than 5,000 companies using Adobe Marketing Cloud software.
The report also ranks social mentions on how positive they were, from one (negative) to ten (positive). It found that the UK has the most positive response to social media out of all English-speaking countries, with a score of 5.45 while the US scores 5.24.
Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst for Adobe's Digital Index, said: "Social media is rapidly maturing as a marketing channel, bolstered by the steps Facebook and Twitter have taken to make their audiences more accessible to marketers.
"Recognising the opportunity, marketers are optimising their campaigns for social channels, and as a result consumers are now using social media much more in their purchasing process. We expect this trend to accelerate during the holiday season."
Adobe's report also reveals geo-targeted posts are up 67 per cent year on year, while posts with video have become less popular, down 40 per cent year on year.
Posts with images are up eight per cent. The report found that posts containing images produce an engagement rate 600 per cent higher than text-based posts.
This article was first published on MediaWeek.
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