Twitter and E-Commerce | The Digital Clicks Blog
Recently, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo suggested that Twitter-based e-commerce could potentially serve as a source of revenue. Many businesses already use Twitter as a means of promoting discount stock and special offers for free. Twitter is already used to stimulate commerce; it has become a valuable asset in any online marketing campaign as a means of distributing information that customers can choose to follow up on if they take an interest. Would brands rethink their use of Twitter if they started taking a cut from the products that are sold via its service? Yes, which makes it unlikely that they would alienate their commercial users; after all, the larger firms are their most overt source of income through promoted tweets and trends. Costolo suggested that there may be an opportunity to remove ‘friction’ from the buying process, which suggests that they may have considered implementing an in-house checkout system, providing users with a quick and convenient means of purchasing products. This could alter the form in which Twitter is used for SMO, as there would be less emphasis on directing traffic to company websites, but it could lead to a tighter relationship between brand awareness and follow-through within Twitter. It is more likely that Twitter will be able to make an income if it can enact immediate reactive purchases. The benefit to businesses would be the removal of the middle ground between followers deciding that they wish to take advantage of an offer and following through on a purchase once they arrive at the website. It's not hard to imagine Twitter’s 140-character tweet cap limiting the amount of information about lesser-known products. Short-term offers through Twitter would be reliant on a user's prior knowledge of the item or service being sold. If a customer had to navigate away from Twitter to research a product, an in-house checkout system would be made redundant. A service like this would seem to only benefit well-known brands and products, in that the customers know what to expect. If Twitter-based commerce were to catch on, though, there would be positive implications for advertising if PPC and/or PPI advertisements became more common and transparent.