Twitter Puts Shopping In The Stream: Personette

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Originally published by Beet.TV Beet.TV •

If ecommerce is the new big wave, Twitter wants to be the river that feeds the torrent.

Last month, the social network announced an integration with ecommerce platform Shopify that helps merchants surface their products in Twitter.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, Sarah Personette, Chief Customer Officer, Twitter, explains why.

Twitter’s insight

“We’ve spent the last year really trying to understand the consumer behaviours around shopping on the platform,” Personette says.

She says that led Twitter to three insights:

  • “There have been over 56 billion tweets about shopping on the platform.”
  • “There are two times the amount of replies per a tweet that is talking about a product or shopping.”
  • “Ultimately we see that three out of four people purchase off of a tweet about a product.”

Shoppable feeds

Last month’s announcement has several components for merchants running on Shopify, all of which work with a new Shopify app Twitter has added to the Shopify App Store:

  1. Onboarding to Twitter’s own, existing Shopping Manager platform.
  2. Syncing products to Twitter.
  3. Highlighting products on Twitter profiles using Shop Spotlight or Twitter Shops features.

Facebook already had a Shopify integration.

“What Shopify allows us to do is access the 1,500-plus merchants in the US to really quickly upload their catalogues and start connecting with the very valuable audience that is Twitter,” Personette says.

Building anticipation

The ecommerce buzz continues apace, accelerated by dramatic changes in shopping behavior in the last couple of years.

Twitter also announced Product Drops, a feature allowing users to sign up for reminders on soon-to-be-released products, building anticipation and fear of missing out.

“If I’m a person who is really in the Christian Dior, I’m going be like, ‘oh my gosh, I need to set that reminder in order to be able to take advantage of it and not lose it before the inventory runs out’,” Personette tells Beet.TV.

Live commerce

But ecommerce isn’t waiting. Twitter also wants to get it on the booming live commerce trend.

Last winter, it announced a Live Shopping stream feature for users, featuring:

  • Live broadcasts.
  • Shoppable banners.
  • Shop tab.
  • Conversation.

“We actually just recently did a live shopping event with Samsung, where we had over 12 million viewers, which was actually the largest event we have ever had on the platform and extremely successful for the brand,” Personette says.

Walmart also used Twitter to livestream a Cyber Deals Sunday event in November.

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