Twitter calls on marketers to tap users’ emotions for commerce tool
Web Summit 2014: Brands that want to sell to Twitter users via its new ecommerce function must ensure they create high impact tweets that provoke emotional engagement, the social network’s head of global revenue has said.
Speaking at the Web Summit in Dublin today (5 November), Adam Bain urged marketers to think carefully about how they can encourage users to make purchases in real time, noting that Twitter is an “in the moment” channel.
In September Twitter launched a ‘buy’ button in the US in partnership with a select group of music artists and brands like Burberry and Home Depot. The button appears when users tweet about a particular product or service.
“We’re experimenting with different price points and products and most importantly, what emotions you need to generate as a business to actually get somebody to buy in the moment,” said Bain. “The best thing about Twitter is that it’s a live platform and we think there’s a huge opportunity for live commerce.”
Twitter’s latest financial results suggest it is having success at monetising its user base. Last week the company’s third quarter results showed that revenues soared by 114% to $361m (£227m), though its share price dropped as user growth disappointed investors and the company announced a net loss of $175m for the quarter.
The majority of Twitter’s revenue derives from its advertising offer, through which brands can buy targeted ‘promoted tweets’. Bain said that Twitter’s data business is also growing strongly, with revenues from this line up 171% year-on-year.
A wide range of organisations are using Twitter data to inform business decisions, he said, including hedge funds seeking intelligence for acquisitions and health companies seeking to track patterns of disease. “That business is very new as well, so expect more from us on the data business,” he added.
