Category: Social Media Marketing

CardSpring is purchased by the massively popular social networking service.

Twitter has announced that it has bought CardSpring – an application platform with a simple API that enables developers to connect digital apps to debit or credit cards – and the social networking giant believes that the payments company will help it provide card-linked offers to consumers, which could help boost its social commerce.

CardSpring is well known for its easy-to-use application programming interface (API).

Commenting on the recent acquisition, CardSpring stated in a blog post that “At Twitter, we will continue to grow the adoption of our platform and work with our publisher, financial, and retail partners to create new, innovative commerce experiences for consumers.”

Twitter has previously provided its users with the ability to obtain discounts and deals. According to Twitter, users can already “surprise someone with a coffee, or even add items to their online shopping cart – all directly from a Tweet.” The company stated that as they work on its commerce future, they are confident that CardSpring and the technology it has developed will be a “great fit”.

There are different ways that Twitter could use CardSpring. As an example, it could use it to allow card-linked offers. For instance, a user could receive a tweet from a merchant containing a discount, which would ask the user to enter their credit card number. Later, when the user makes a purchase from this merchant either in-store or online, CardSpring would recognize the credit card number and automatically apply the discount.

At the same time, it would provide the merchant with performance analytics of their offer. Thus, these types of promotions could increase Twitter’s relevancy to local businesses interested in boosting their in-store sales and not just their follows and retweets.

The recent acquisition could lead to a brighter social commerce future for Twitter over Facebook.

Prior to Twitter’s announcement, Facebook revealed it had begun testing its Buy button, which allows online shoppers to buy goods and services directly from their News Feed. However, the one major social commerce advantage that Twitter may have over its competitor is its retweet feature. On Facebook, users can click “Like” on a post and they can also “Share” it, but a retweet immediately shares a message to all of that user’s followers. In other words, it gives merchants a much greater chance of growing their customer base because retweets are likely to reach more users and re-sharing is a huge part of the Twitter culture.

A Social Media Examiner report has revealed a strong preference for this specific network in advertising.

Nearly every social network – including the current reigning king, Facebook, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn – have entered into a massive advertising war around the world, as each one attempts to become the leader in social media marketing.

This highly lucrative advertising channel has turned into a fierce battleground for brands of all size.

Marketers have been considerably increasing their social media marketing activities over the various different networking websites in order to be able to acquire new customers and maintain relationships with existing ones. Now, Social Media Examiner has published a document authored by Michael A. Steltzner entitled “2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report”, which involved an analysis of a massive global study.

This social media marketing study involved the participation of 2,800 marketers around the globe.

Among them, 92 percent felt that the use of social media for advertising purpose was considered to be critical for their businesses. This is a meaningful increase over the 2013 figure, which was 86 percent. Of the respondents, 89 percent felt that it was important for them to learn various different types of tactics that would allow them to use these channels for better results from their various ad campaigns.

Facebook was by far the “most important marketing platform”, as 54 percent of the survey respondents labeled it as such. In a very second place was LinkedIn, which was deemed most important by 17 percent of the respondents. Another 12 percent felt that Twitter was the most important. Not only is this good news for Facebook, on its own, but it also represents meaningful growth over last year’s figures, at which time only 40 percent felt that this social network was the most important for marketing.

In fourth place in terms of overall social media marketing was blogging, which was the top vote of only 8 percent of the participants in the survey. While some analysts have been predicting an impending death of Facebook, it appears as though the network is continuing to hold its own for the moment.