Social commerce network Pepper.com has analysed data that shows retailers in the UK are leading the way when it comes to traffic from social media platforms and the number of followers and fans for these websites, compared to Germany and France. And it’s fashion retailers specifically that have the most social media followers in the UK.

Although US retailers beat the UK hands down in pure numbers, the relative population size of each country gives the UK a lead. 

The stats gathered for the 30 leading online retailers of each country in terms of reach, are based on a Similar Web ranking and data manually gathered from social media platforms such as You Tube, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram. They show that UK stores have an average of 5.47m social media fans followed by Germany with 2.74m and France with 2.6m. The top 30 online retailers in the US have an average of 13.2m social media followers or fans.

This backs up a study from Pew Research Center, which shows that 66% of internet users in Britain say they use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, followed by France (57%) and Germany (50%). America is slightly ahead of the UK with 71% of internet users advising that they use social networks. 

So what does that mean in terms of sales and profits? Not necessarily much! Having a high number of social media followers doesn’t guarantee success in terms of traffic from these platforms. According to this research, the top 30 online retailers in the UK, France and Germany only generate an average of less than 3% of their traffic from social media with the US generating 3.5% of traffic this way. Ouch!

At least fashion retailers in the UK have the highest number of social media fans and followers from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube subscribers and Google+ with six of these types of retailers appearing in the top 10 of the most popular online retailers in the UK in terms of social media (out of the top 30 most popular online retailers according to Similar Web).

H&M has the most fans across social (45.46m) followed by Zara (34.7m), Topshop (14.37m), Asos (11.76m), M&S (5.48m) and New Look (4.56m). The only non-fashion-specific retailers that appeared in the top 10 most social media followers were Groupon (15.38m), Amazon (7.22m), Etsy (4.63m) and Tesco (2.57m).