Testing a way for you to make purchases on Twitter
blog.twitter.comThere are exactly zero times I wished I could buy something from a Tweet with a button. Given that limited observation of buyer behavior, and knowing full well Twitter wishes to make profit, I'm assuming these buttons will be forced into my public stream somewhere, somehow. Some people on here think these buttons will be placed there by Twitter via ads, but I have another idea:
Provide a micropayment channel program where, when I retweet a purchase button, I get part of the revenue share. Use cryptocurrencies to implement the feature. See @tipdoge for reference.
Yes, an affiliate marketing scheme like this would have a big impact
as well at turn the social network into a cesspool.
Social networks are already messy. I'd stop short of calling them cesspools, however. Software makes content better. Better software makes content I don't know I want more available to me.
If something isn't interesting, or doesn't earn anyone money, people won't retweet it.
Fortunately for you, twitter is now forcing tweets into your timeline!
I'd be pretty likely to buy music off Twitter if it was released there exclusively. Come to think of it, I'd be highly likely to buy one-off items from Etsy, Gumroad, and Amazon through my Twitter stream as well.
You had everyone until "use cryptocurrencies".
No, I had YOU until I said cryptocurrencies. Everyone else, well, they speak for themselves.
When I saw a band in the list of test clients, it sort of made sense. I wouldn't buy clothes, but spend $1 to get this soundboard boot of a song from concert X? I'd probably click that.
And now that I think of it, also books and concert tickets. One thing that frustrates me endlessly about fiction authors is they don't curate mailing lists. For whatever reason -- and they must have tested it -- amazon does not do a good job of informing you of new releases from authors you've purchased. I have a handful of authors I like enough that I buy everything they write. The smarter ones curate email lists to help me do that, but I think twitter often serves that purpose for authors and bands. So if they could sell me concert tickets or their new releases inline I may well buy.
> There are exactly zero times I wished I could buy something from a Tweet with a button.
But there are a huge number of times when a corporation has wished it could make it super easy for you to make a snap purchasing decision.
You are correct sir.
This is the equivalent of a an "impulse" rack of merch at the checkout line at the grocery store or a gas station.
All they need are enough people (less than 5% I'd assume) to use it to become commonplace in your feeds. I knew it eventually come to this.
What if they were tickets to something:
"Announcing super concert 2,000 is open for ticket purchases! Click here now to get your!!! ONLY 5,000 slots available!"
You sound exactly like their target market, too! /s
I'm going to guess you don't use the 'one-click buy' button on Amazon either?
That's a terrible comparison. Amazon is a retailer, Twitter is not. Amazon provides a massive amount of helpful information to buyers. Twitter provides almost none. For starters.
For people with significant followings, Twitter is a marketing platform. This might enable an affiliate (or self publication) model to work well on Twitter.
Amazon has an established reputation as a low-priced retailer, and stakes its reputation on that. Twitter seems to intend this as more of an ease-of-purchase kind of feature. My expectation is that there is little to no incentive for Twitter to be pricing these products competitively.
Not everyone comparison shops for all products. Many people are happy paying a standard price for certain goods, without hesitation. For example, expecting to pay $10-15 for a t-shirt is common, as is paying $1 for a song. For these sorts of purchases, reducing the friction from discovery to purchase is pretty important. Suffice to say, I probably wont buy a car or a vacuum cleaner on Twitter.
I buy things off Amazon because I go there to buy things. So yes, I guess I use that button. :)
Amazon does use more than 140 characters to present a product.
And often has reviews on the same page.
The reviews are the key. I always jump straight to the reviews. Half the time I never read the item description.
You can always add a link to the tweet for more details.
And then you can buy from the page with the details. Forcing you to go back to the twit to buy would be a bad idea.
Embedding the buy button wired up to your twitter account might not be so awful?
I'm actually impressed they found a way to monetize their platform that doesn't involve obtrusive ads. This seems like a good source of income for them and their clients, and as long as they don't force you to follow commercial accounts, it will be almost invisible to anyone who doesn't want to see it.
I'm cautiously optimistic.
Exactly my thoughts. I think at this moment we are all so scared of possible future changes, always for the sake of profits against users' will, that something as simple and inoffensive as this is actually a pleasant surprise.
I hope they will be happy enough with the button's results to not jump to other, more irritating changes. And also hope that this is not just a door for some future ads spike.
No, it's ads. You can just now buy from the ads directly.
No, it's not ads. Sponsored tweets will likely get the same treatment but this is the start of a two-sided marketplace where users stay on the site to buy an item from a tweet of someone they're following, rather than the old method which was to follow a bitly or gumroad link.
Any idea what the payment commision will be?
If I had to guess it'd be similar to Gumroads 5% + 25cents.
I don't know where you get that idea. They explicitly say "some Tweets from our test partners will feature a “Buy” button", there is no mention of ads. The implication is, if I don't follow their partners, I won't see the buy button.
Just because you voluntarily follow the ads does it not still make them ads?
Then any corporate accounts you follow now are 'ads'. It's an added button, no more, no less. If that magically makes an otherwise neutral tweet an ad, you need a more rigorous definition of advertisement.
Until they start injecting the buy features into regular sponsored tweets. That will happen for sure.
That's a possibility, but that still wouldn't be more intrusive than the current sponsored tweets. If anything, if this model is successful, they might even reduce the amount of sponsored stuff appearing in your timeline.
A platform rejecting ad customers? Not going to happen, ever.
"Number of ads to show" is something that can be optimized. Too much ads have a negative effect on your entire platform, so you need to strike the balance. 'As much as possible, but not too much'. If they can improve perception of their platform and improve the view-to-click ratios of their buy buttons by showing less sponsored content and rejecting customers, they will. A company always tries to find the economic optimum.
One use case I can think of that might be suited to real time updates/shopping would be when a football/soccer team releases a new season shirt. I follow the EPL, there's always a huge fuss in the media when the big teams release their new shirt (not sure if this applies to American sports), if the images broke first on Twitter it could be a good source of sales.
The downside is that it would be quite one-off, the interest would die quickly.
> a way to monetize their platform that doesn't involve obtrusive ads.
Promoted Tweets are quite intrusive already...
it is a big conundrum if your core product, through its simplicity, is really great.
you hire all these product people, have all these investors, but any direction you can take the product actually makes it worse against its initial, great core use.
twitter as a protocol is on a level with smtp - a lucky strike, hitting a need, something for the ages. journalists, media, etc. love it. RSS on a whole new level.
but twitter as a product company? smtp is a not a profit model, you need to have real, closed products - hence the API limits, hence all this other bull. they have a narrow scope hit product and will kill it by making it broad. a little bit like google and search, put ads on it, done, the rest is noise driven by boredom and/or panic (we need to justify our existence!).
twitters design team is bigger than most startups - and for what? the whole slack team fits into the twitter reception area and covers how many platforms, apps, use cases by now?
you threw a lucky punch with a communication channel/protocol, but now you're stuck. aren't we happy that the smtp or unix guys as a whole didn't try the same. "monetize".
Twitter isn't a protocol. If it was, there'd be Twitter (the protocol) based services everywhere, and it'd be open and federated.
Twitter is a service. Services need money. It's a simple as that.
Thing is, Twitter should be a protocol. It clearly fills an existing need (I see it as very similar to email in that regard, just filling a different need – people want to chat publicly with each other and in a very informal way inform the public about things), but it doesn’t really make sense as a service that wants to make money.
Twitter should be just like email, not this one monopoly controlling everything. It’s sad that that’s the way it is.
I feel exactly the same about Facebook. There should be a protocol for social networks and should be federated with no one controlling everything, similar to email.
If fact, I believe it will go this way at some point in the future, despite how impregnable Facebook seems now. At one point Bebo and MySpace seemed unassailable too.
Twitter was open to the protocol idea once, when they were even allowing Twitter clones to be built using their API. Chances are they simply ran the numbers and saw that that route was not big enough to fulfill their lofty ambitions.
The only way the social network protocol can be realised is if you have a lucky band of developers for whom everything just clicks into place without funding, like Craigslist. Unfortunately that's really hard to achieve in today's internet landscape where anyone with a large hosting bill gets an offer they can't refuse from a VC.
I'm not sure if it's even possible to build a twitter-like system with distributed servers in the vein of e-mail. It's possible for e-mail because it's a one-way system. Twitter has the concept of following a user, and that user's tweets appear to me. It's a 2-way system that needs to constantly be kept in sync. Even if it's possible to do, it won't be easy, with loads of extra technical challenges that SMTP doesn't have.
There was already an open standard to do everything but the private messaging part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OStatus
App.net is like Twitter, the protocol. Not quite the same, but it's basically Twitter as a platform, where the core business is federation and an API for services to build off.
Still centralized, still controlled by one company, but it's a step in the right direction. It's a shame they're struggling to survive against worse services.
Twitter is a private company so they should continue to do whatever they please. If you want to create a decentralized Twitter go for it... my guess is it would be about as popular as Diaspora but all the praise to you if you can disrupt them.
They can do whatever they please. I can wish that they would do something else. They obviously won’t. It’s not in their own self-interest.
Saying they should remain this cynical monopoly that does shitty things just seems nonsensical to me. No, they should not. They can. They do. I think they shouldn’t.
I mean, none of this will actually happen. Twitter will continue to have a monopoly and I see no realistic way to change that. I don’t think there will ever be Twitter as a protocol. I’m just saying there should be. It did work out for email. And, yeah, email is imperfect in so, so, so many ways, but at least it isn’t under control by a single company.
You're allowed to think whatever you want obviously; my point was that stating you'd wish they'd gone a different direction is much different than seemingly positioning an argument for what they should and shouldn't do as realistic or in any way beneficial for Twitter. I'm glad you cleared that up but your personal opinions on their direction seem in contention with your admittance that it wouldn't be possible or advantageous for them to follow what you'd like them to do. In regards to email, the oligopoly of decent clients act in a way really no less perverse than Twitter does (which I don't think is much at all mind you).
it started as such. lots of 3rd party clients, cool new use cases and UIs. all squashed by now. API caps, etc.
they need money, sure. but not just to operate and make a nice profit, they need to grow, they need blowout quarter after blowout quarter. impossible with this simple and clean core product. hence doom on the horizon. just look at all the bad feedback they're getting for their feed changes. core audience hates it. won't bring new users. stuck.
twitter could/should be run like craisglist or reddit. hardcore maintainence mode. neat little business. but no VC will ever allow it.
Here's what the problem is: twitter isn't a product company. It's a service company. They didn't just invent a protocol, like the SMTP guys did, they provide a service for free. That means they need money to hire people, maintain servers, and survive in general. Even if they didn't want to make any money, if they never cared for profit, they would still need a way to have their service generate income.
I agree that it's a conundrum for them, but with this solution at least they're trying to do it in a non-obtrusive way that doesn't jeopardize the entire platform.
> unix guys as a whole didn't try the same. "monetize".
um.. UNIX started out as a closed-source commercial OS.
It would be interesting to see if content writers can promote their content through this to earn money through micro-payments. Likely Steps: 1. Capture attention in 140 characters. 2. Provide a good deal for the article/content at a small price
Just being optimistic about news, article writers. I guess we might soon see Economist stories with nice 140 character titles and eye-catchy pictures with a buy button to read full article, post which it's added to your twitter shelf. I wonder if this just might prove to be the payment mechanism needed for such content consumption. Somewhat similar to the app-store economy, twitter might become the content-store. Let's see...
Though I hope the dominant commerce part is kept as a separate tab perhaps like "Discover" tab, as I guess I wouldn't want to have my twitter stream as a series of ads. One or two "buy" tweets might be ok though I think... Will have to wait and watch how this goes.
That sounds like it'd encourage misleading clickbait even more than the current Internet.
I was thinking exactly this. While for purchases of multiple items in groups or of items which I typically research first (most things), smaller commodity or usually single-items purchases might make sense in this context.
One such thing would be an eBook or similar that you'd buy from someone you know or know of on Twitter.
See Chirpify[1], who has since pivoted. I don't know if that pivot was because of the idea or because Twitter decided it made more sense to be an ad wall than a platform.
I really, truly do not understand Twitter's thinking. I'm sure on someone's spreadsheet of imaginary numbers it looks more attractive to be a billboard, but Twitter had the opportunity to be a true platform. A platform gives you control. It's a longer-term play, but my goodness the opportunities missed. Including this one, which could have been in play years ago.
Whether people will actually use this feature is a whole other question.
[1] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/sell-simply
Edit: Clarify first P.
This is a little bit too hand-wavy to me. You mention only a single opportunity Twitter missed by not focusing on being a "true platform", and then you immediately hedge by saying that you're not sure people will actually use it.
Sandy comes to mind, and is actually a better example. (Although Google seems to have forgotten it existed.)
For clarity, I see Twitter as having this amazing potential as a message bus for both people, apps, and services. And I feel that potential has been squandered.
I'm unsure if this particular idea is going to pay off. But the general notion of an ecosystem of services hanging off of Twitter seems like the right one to me.
(This is usually where someone says app.net, and I say 'critical mass'.)
How do you make money as a message bus? I'm not saying I disagree (I take no position on the merits of Twitter-as-a-servce, as I am not a user), but clearly the Best Minds have decided that the attention economy (read: ads) is the way forward. How do you pay for that critical mass? Twitter isn't something that falls out of infrastructure -- decisions had and have to be taken to spend resources.
While selling people to advertisers is getting harder, and therefore less margin-friendly, it'd take a braver company than Twitter to turn their back on the model. IMO.
It's not entirely either/or. They have a website and an official app, so advertising is always going to be on the table.
You make money by charging companies for access to the platform. Charge for access, charge for users, charge per tweet. There are options. This is not a new idea. (See EDI etc.)
Advertising is way more lucrative. See $FB. HNers need to come to grips with the fact that advertising is by far the best way to monetize attention. And it's quite possible that will never change.
Not sure how happy I'll be with the pairing of this and Twitter's supposed new "Facebook"-style timeline. Time will tell.
So that means people could eventually buy the ebooks I promote right from the tweet. Neat.
In an incredible turn of timing, I created a mockup of a Facebook icon for the exact same functionality about six hours ago:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sed9ewxz25turey/Screenshot%202014-...
Facebook already tried something like this when they purchased Karma and it didn't work out too well.
I think one of my favorite things about this is that it actually makes product information available in the meta tags.
<meta property="twitter:item:variant1:id" value="n6NDAWFNqjkNZftJWq0BQw==" /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:title" value="Small" /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:inventory_count" value=1 /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:price" value=75000000 /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:tax_category" value="included_in_price" /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:last_updated" value=1409259500000 /> <meta property="twitter:item:variant1:attribute1:text" value="Small" />
It's interesting that they would not partner with Square somehow for this given @Jack...
This could become big. Imagine celebrities tweeting buy link for their album or donation links when some calamity strikes or AMZN/Flipkart launching an exclusive deal/product on twitter or imagine launch of a new book/phone/car and tweeting buy button to prebook it. This could take impulse buy to a whole new level. Has Twitter finally found a viable business model ?
I wonder if there's a way to generalize this so any text or image can have metadata about purchasing the exact product. Something like a shorter UPC but with a non-intrusive reader embedded everywhere offering you to buy the product through manufacturer-controlled channels (varying depending on what country you are in).
You "just" need to get enough users to install the scanning software; maybe the next iPhone will come with Apple Shopping that scans all text you see and all images for the metadata/watermarks. As it detected a product, the new second $ button lights up. Press down on it for a second, and the product information pops up (Apple Shopping knows your size/address/credit card already of course). Hold it down for a few seconds longer, and you've made your purchase. Don't, and a few weeks later maybe the seller gets to send you a 10% off coupon.
Actually, Amazon's phones might already have something like that, letting you scan a bar code in a physical shop but purchase from Amazon.
Isn't this effectively the failed cuecat model?
Any app/website with a large user base should probably add this feature. The main value here, compared to simply dropping an ecommerce link in a tweet (the current use case), is piggy backing payment and fulfillment on top of the existing twitter user account.
Would be interesting to see how these things develop -- fulfillment and payment processing are double-edged swords.
Bolting on fulfillment to a twitter-purchase seems like a lot of work, but as another commentator said, I'm cautiously optimistic.
Lots of people enjoy shopping, so this isn't as obviously bad of an idea as some of the comments here imply. Open question whether this will be more like "hanging out at the mall" or "watching QVC."
This is the first positive move I've seen from Twitter in a long time as far as building a sustainable business.
[edit] I say this after having tried every single one of their ad products without any success.
Let's hope that the selling-out of Twitter will give a nudge to its open decentralized competitors... I'm not holding my breath, but who knows ? I still dream of an XMPP Twitter...
I don't think that Twitter's effort to monetize is directly equal to selling out. If the service's quality degrades significantly (too many pushy ads and buy buttons) then, I'd say it sold out. So far, I've found the ads fairly relevant and not too frequent.
I may be oversensitive to spam (I must admit that my love of ad-blocking software in all sorts of systems borders on mania) but the very idea that I now have to be wary of Sponsored Tweets that require an effort to unsee has already started to spoil the experience.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, etc, etc. I like the Sponsored Tweets compared to the alternatives: either paying to use Twitter or banner ads.
Or hosting your own... Take a look at http://twister.net.co - it has potential for scalable decentralized peer-to-peer microblogging.
The question on my mind is this: how can this possibly make anyone any money, given Apple's 30% cut on in-app purchases? I seriously doubt Apple would give that up.
Interesting point - depending on how this is implemented, all iOS Twitter clients could already be violating the App Store guidelines!
My main concern is security. When Twitter stores your payment information it will be easy to buy something with a single click. But I've seen way too many Twitter hacking going on when I look at friends' timelines. If tweets like 'How I lost 100 lbs in 3 months! Click > bit.ly/youwillbehacked' can be posted without too much effort, these same hackers could buy stuff for free by just hacking into your Twitter account.
Twitter offers 2 factor authentication for account logins (SMS a code every time you login).
This should be forced whenever you try to purchase something
Because buying a product based on a 140 character description is a thing that should be encouraged.
By the looks of it, clicking on the link brings you to a page with a lengthier description.
You can see more information, select variations of the product ('red or green') and there should also be a link to the vendors product page as well.
The Buy button in the feed might confuse some users though, since it will likely open the information panel.
A way to bet on a sport/game via Twitter would be an interesting thing to do. Couple of months ago, I actually looked for ways to do it around the Twitter's cards API but never managed to get beyond the initial thoughts of doing so.
Not sure how many people would like to associate their credit card information with their Twitter profiles. Maybe they can include other sensible options like Bitcoin?
Don't we all have a friend or two who tries to sell you stuff while we're hanging out with friends on a night out?
That's what buy ads feel like on social networks.
How are the economics of such a model for twitter? Retailer margins are usually thin and you need further split with stripe and the feed publisher.
As long as it doesn't get forced onto 3rd party clients, even their own Tweetdeck, then I don't really care. For now...
I don't get it. How can a "Buy" button bother anyone? You're following a company that sells something you're interested in, they have a promotion or something on Twitter, you buy it with one click. Am I missing something?
Or is it just super cool to hate anything that could potentially generate some profit for Twitter?
Because it opens the doors for referrals and sponsors.
Personally I think it's a good idea, for the brands and people I follow I know I'll only be getting shown the 'Buy' button for targeted items. However, I know my friends and family follow people who are clearly paid to promote a product.
Just to give you an example, Mark Wright is a reality TV celebrity here in England, and it's clear he is paid to promote diet supplements. if you check out his tweets you'll see that he's always retweeting, and taking pics of them (https://twitter.com/MarkWright_).
At the moment, conversion metrics are quite hard to get, however imagine if each one had a Buy button. It would be super easy to see which tweets leads to sales, which in turn will lead to a more aggressive sales pitch in order to bump up your conversions and maximise on referrals, as they'd likely to change to a percentage of sales rather than a fixed fee now that conversations are recordable.
There used to be a thing that you have to disclose your affiliation (think it was cmp.ly) but don't believe it ever got enforced, much like the EU Cookie Law, kind of.
Don't get me wrong, in my feed I trust people I follow and this won't happen. But for casual tweeters, it's just too easy to be exploited.
Unless it's not from a company I'm following. Inevitably this will show up in the ads I'm shown on the site, which are things I do not follow.
With or without the buy button you are seeing the adds.
Also, total change of culture from distributing (arguably) interesting and entertaining content to selling and promoting stuff.
Result: more noise, much lower snr.
Because when I'm browsing Twitter my first thought is usually "Gee I wish I could buy some random thing."
Just a guess you aren't following "random" companies but rather things you are interested in?
OcculusVR: New Rift is out! [Buy]
SXSW: Tickets on sale now! [Buy]
JKRowling: Just release my new Book [Buy]
Steam: [Some new Triple A game] is released [Buy]
RaspberryPi: New Pi Beowulf cluster available for purchase [Buy]
RedCross: [Some disaster] we need your support [Donate]
(I'm sure a donate will come along if this works)
Anywho, there have to be _tons_ of impulse buyers in the world. People will click
> (I'm sure a donate will come along if this works)
That would be a very relevant functionality : Twitter is all instant emotion and therefore a perfect platform for impulse donations !
Going down this list made me realize how tempting it would be to have a buy button right next to the tweet.
The comment is probably glib but to respond to it in seriousness: Twitter is a place where you bathe in the stochastic. Why not see if it's also a place where people will make buying decisions based on the same? I think it's an idea worthy of experimentation.
After seeing this, I had a thought what if FB also brings 'buy' buttons on similar lines where pages can post items with a price tag and 'buy' button? It will surely be a nice revenue stream. Both FB and Twitter have an incredible reach. If Twitter can bring this experience about in a non-intrusive way, then it's a win-win for everyone.
They have.
They are definitely trying to get the experience right by going with limited partners and exposing the feature to small user base. I imagine, if they had opened the floodgates immediately, then we would have seen the 'buy' button left right and centre on the feed.
I can see this being useful, and welcome it. Particularly for music downloads a la iTunes etc.
Wonder if this spells the end of companies like Chripify that do this as their business model.
Didn't realize someone had already commented on that very thing. :\
If you don't like the direction twitter is heading, try quitter.se, ello.co, app.net
The problem with those is no one I know uses them, and they're generally happy with Twitter. And I don't disagree with them.
app.net wanted more than I could afford to follow more than a few people, but the others look interesting. I'll give them a look.
edit: ello won't accept my email for the invitation request. Quitter looks like a clone of Twitter, and barely anyone in the public timeline speaks English. Not sure what to do with this.
edit 2: It looks like it took the request and sent me ten different confirmation emails while showing an error on the form. This doesn't make me feel good about the service.
Or, better yet, pump.io or identi.ca, federated services which can be bridged to Twitter.
So, who has a good Twitter client capable of filtering the [redacted] Promoted Tweets ?
Will Twitter compete with tipbots, and will that effect their legality?
Bought on Twitter: Twought.
SO, now twitter wants to store financial data on users now too?
No thanks
Do not want.
Some of the participating followers in this program have millions of followers, Twitter is seriously getting into this purchasing business