Twitter Offers


In case you were on Planet Lost somewhere last week, you might have missed this, like I did. Twitter has launched Twitter Offers, enabling advertisers to create card-linked promotions and share them directly with Twitter users.



Social platforms are under increasing pressure to create closely knit funnels leading to conversions and sales, and Offers appears to be a cool way to do it, but apparently not. Naysayers have written it off, if not completely----Users link their cards to Twitter and on clicking on online coupons, can automatically redeem them when the same credit card is used in the associated store.

Did Twitter do something like this before? Oh yes, with Amazon, recorded on this blog by yours truly (Have Consumers Embraced #AmazonCart?, http://digitalmarketingconclave.blogspot.in/2014/08/amazon-cart.html).


An omni-channel experience works well only when one thing is seamless---integration. You don't cause the customer to move beyond his core purchase experience. And Offers does have friction in the experience. First, the movement of the customer from online to offline with a time-lag to avail the discount (which is not instantaneous; it gets reflected in cash-back savings) is a disruption. Second, how is the discount stored on the cards? What about redemption data? If a marketer were to evaluate this; they would surely look for viewership data, conversion data and not just redemption rate. Not saying that Offers wouldnt take off, but managing the merchant-bank-product trioka is not easy. Good things though are that
merchants use their existing payment network, no customer/employee training, and no new hardware/software installation, things that typically obstruct a roll-out like this.

Twitter's recent acquisition, CardSpring,allows developers to build digital applications linked to a variety of credit and debit cards. CardSpring was acquired to drive in-tweet purchasing and it is reported that the next feature that Twitter might roll out are money transfers.


Card-linked promotions are difficult to implement--the outcomes of promotions like this may just redefine the ease/difficulty of linking commerce to social media.

Source:

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/twitter-introduces-twitter-offers-news/#9

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/twitter-offers-twitter-now-lets-advertisers-post-deals-and-discounts-in-users-feeds/514923-11.html
http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/twitter-let-store-coupons-debit-card-twitter-offers/

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