Twitter have been working hard on turning its social network into an attractive offering to retailers. This year alone Twitter cards have become common place and more sophisticated, especially with the addition of amazon cart / amazon basket.
Yesterday Twitter announced their latest move into social commerce, the buy button: currently the buy button is only available to a small % of users in the US.
I have two quick notes:
1. This won’t actually help the problem with acquiring new users and keeping existing customers happy, it will probably mean less followers and less people who want to be sold to on a social network with a growth and retention issue.
2. Brands will abuse it until it hurts them and Twitter – Twitter is smart to roll out the buy button (and shows investors it can make money away from it’s questionable ads platform and I have to say the Twitter analytics platform is more powerful than most people realise) however brands are going to try and turn Twitter from an open communication medium into a sales extension or direct shop window and I am sure this will frustrate users.
Marketing teams including their community managers, social media managers, customer services and the sales teams are going to have to work closely together to create attainable goals and targets – this won’t be easy for any team especially ones that have built an engaged community on Twitter.
What are your thoughts?