Twitter has been really working on improving their ability to generate revenue over the past year, and they have just announced a major new feature that will likely help in that area. In addition, it will give advertisers an extremely easy option for targeting their customers with useful and actionable Tweets that will directly drive sales.
The feature is called, “Twitter Offers,” and it gives advertisers the ability to send out digital coupons within their tweets. Twitter users will be able to link any major credit or debit card directly to their account, which they can then use to claim the offer.
When the Tweet’s go out, anyone who doesn’t already have a credit or debit card attached to their account will be given the option to set it up immediately. This will be very important during the initial phases of this program because without a large percentage of users having the ability to make the purchase, it can’t be effective.
The coupons can either be for digital products, online purchases or even purchased completed in a retail store. This gives the users plenty of options on how they will claim their money saving coupon, and allows advertisers to target their audience in a very effective way.
Twitter’s Product Manager, Tarun Jain, wrote the following in a post about this new feature:
With Twitter Offers, advertisers will be able to attribute redemptions directly to their campaigns on Twitter, so that they can effectively measure the ROI from their promotions, even when redemption happens offline. Additionally, we make it easy for merchants to get up and running because they can use their existing payment network, there’s no change to the customer purchase process, no employee training and no new hardware or software to install. By leveraging Twitter’s robust targeting capabilities, advertisers can tailor their promotions and campaigns to the right audience, while optimizing for performance.
This new feature may have actually been inspired by a campaign that American Express came up with some time ago. The credit card company allowed users to enjoy discounts on certain things when they tweeted a specific hastag. This new feature from Twitter, of course, really pushes this to the next level and gives advertisers a lot more control over the entire process.
If this feature sounds like something you will be interested in using for your company or clients, you will still have to wait a little while before you can use it. Twitter is currently only rolling it out in the United States, and only to a number of pre-selected brands who will be doing some final beta testing. Once any bugs are worked out and Twitter decides it is ready for increased adoption, they will open it up to all US companies, and then likely companies around the world.
Don’t fret, however, this type of testing doesn’t typically take too long to complete, and this is something that Twitter will likely want to get rolled out quickly before other social media platforms are able to develop a competing version of the same idea.
