Twitter Inc. announced on Tuesday that it’s expanding its commerce offerings with a new product called Twitter Offers.
- Companies that are advertising on Twitter can use Offers to attach cashback rewards to their tweets, which will be automatically placed onto the consumer’s credit card or debit card after a purchase.
- Twitter users just have to click on the offer to add it to their card and then they can go and use that card to complete the purchase.
- While consumers get cashback, marketers will know whether their ads are actually driving people to make purchases or not.
A tweet could be a powerful nudge
The prospect of offering coupons through Twitter that are automatically applied to a purchase seem quite appealing. From a marketer’s perspective, crafting campaigns that involve urgent action taken on the part of the consumer are often desirable. Twitter delivers that because of its real-time nature, and its ease of use means locking in a sale could literally be a click away. However it’s not clear at this point what the initial set-up on the consumer end will be to load a card onto the system, and you can expect some resistance on the part of consumers who are typically wary of storing payment information in the cloud.
At this stage, Twitter Offers is only a trial being run in the U.S. with several brands. So it’s something to watch for the year ahead.
