Twitter has been going through quite a few changes as of late, and business owners might want to start paying attention. The blue-bird-themed social networking platform recently added a buy button to some of its tweets. With this button, users can now buy right from Twitter on their mobile devices, a move that should bring Twitter much needed revenue; but how will it affect casual users, and are the terms attractive enough to bring new business owners on board? Only time will tell, but let’s take a deeper look into these new Twitter changes to see what’s up.
In order to learn the specifics of the new Twitter buy button, we should go right to the source. Group Product Manager Tarun Jain recently wrote on the official Twitter blog, “This is an early step in our building functionality into Twitter to make shopping from mobile devices convenient and easy, hopefully even fun. Users will get access to offers and merchandise they can’t get anywhere else and can act on them right in the Twitter apps for Android and iOS; sellers will gain a new way to turn the direct relationship they build with their followers into sales.”
Right now, the Twitter buy button is only available to a limited number of users; but the social networking platform plans to expand it across the board to all users and Twitter businesses before long.
Right now the buy button is considered as being in a testing phase, and only a few select vendors can use it. This consists of name brands like Burberry and Home Depot, and music artists like Eminem and Megadeth.
How the Twitter Buy Button Works
The buy button is designed to act like Amazon’s one-click button. In other words, it makes it very easy for customers to buy. This may leave you wondering about your credit card information and all your personal details. Like Amazon, Twitter promises to securely hold this information and never sell or trade it to any other Twitter businesses or buyers – you know, the standard fare from tech companies who want access to your valuable data.
After a user clicks the buy button, he or she will be taken to a product or service landing page. It’s there that the Twitter user will confirm the purchase and buy. So Amazon still has Twitter beat on one-click functionality, but an extra click really isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things. Once the sale is verified, Twitter will send the order information to the Twitter businesses in question to complete the transaction.
Will the Buy Button Be Effective?
Let’s get back to our original questions.
How will the buy button affect casual users? For them, the buy buttons will be embedded inside normal-sized tweets, so all they’ll notice is an extra image or two on their mobile screens.
Will the move be enough to bring new Twitter businesses on board? It just might. A study commissioned last year by Twitter saw that 72% of small business followers said they would be likely to purchase a product from that business. And get this: You don’t need to pay for sponsored tweets to use the new feature. That means that business owners can get started driving sales from Twitter immediately and for little to no investment. Of course, those Twitter businesses will have to wait for the feature to roll out platform-wide. It started to appear in late July, so it shouldn’t take long for you to be able to use it.
Conclusion
The buy button is an interesting move by Twitter, and one that could put the social networking platform on the map as far as revenue earned. Right now the company is struggling to make money, at least when compared to its much larger sibling Facebook, but this new feature could change all that entirely. If the company can get casual users to see Twitter as a place to get their favorite goods from the companies they follow, the buy button could indeed be ‘bought’ by everyone who uses Twitter.
Keep looking out for Twitter’s buy button to roll out to your profile soon. Until then, I would love to know what you think about the buy button and whether or not you’ll be using it for your own business purposes when the roll-out is complete.
Do you ‘buy’ Twitter’s new buy button? Let’s talk about it in the comments section below.
