Twitter announced a partnership with the e-commerce company Shopify yesterday, at a press meeting at Cannes Lions
Twitter’s Chief Customer Officer Sarah Personette, US Vice President of Client Solutions Robin Wheeler, GM of Consumer and Revenue Product Jay Sullivan and Senior Director of Product Manager Deng-Kai Chen explained Twitter’s ambitions and explained the context around the new products the company has been introducing for the past year.
At the heart of the company’s social shopping ambitions is the insight that there were 50 billion impressions about shopping last year, with shopping conversations generating 2.7K more impressions than the average tweet. The company also emphasised that 70% of people on Twitter see brands on Twitter as part of the enjoyment of using the social media platform.
Twitter’s young and growing audience (the company stated that it’s monetizable daily active users increased by 20% in the past year) constitutes a unique opportunity for brands to connect more deeply with the consumers and develop its own online personality, the company said.
Building on the social shopping features the company introduced last year, including Live Shopping, Twitter Shops and Shopping Manager, the company is launching several new tools aimed at businesses and brands. Among these is the company’s new partnership with Shopify, which is available now to all US-based merchants and will roll out to other regions in the upcoming months. Through the new partnership, businesses can now load their entire product catalogue to Twitter using their Shopify accounts. Businesses can also use Twitter’s Shop Spotlight feature to show five products on their profiles.
Twitter also introduced Product Drops — a new feature that the company developed after it noticed that some brands were using the platform to create excitement around their new products. Now with Product Drops, users can set a reminder to when the drop happens and start a conversation around it.
Among today’s announcements was a set of new ad products the company developed around its social shopping ambitions. Brands will now be able to show their products in 3D using Product Explorer Ads, create customised animated link buttons using Brand Likes (available in the US, UK and Japan from next week) and launch interactive ads through Playable Ads, and link to outside web pages using Interactive Text. Brands can use the Campaign Planner to have an idea of the ROIs the campaign will generate before its launch (available in UK, USA and Japan).
Featured image: Shopify
