Tag: social media shopping

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.

To a growing extent, these platforms are driving visitors to online shopping sites.

The findings from the Q4 2013 Social Media Intelligence Report from Adobe have now been released and have revealed important social media marketing trends, revealing that this channel drives traffic to retail websites.

This report looked into trends involving paid, earned and owned social media.

Among the primary findings of this social media marketing report was that Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr were sending a tremendous and record breaking amount of valuable traffic onto retail websites in the last quarter of last year. It also determined that the revenue per visit (RPV) was rising across each of those networks.

This report used an extensive data analysis to provide meaningful social media marketing insight.

The analysis was performed using a considerable amount of aggregated and anonymous data that was collected from retail, travel, entertainment, and media sites from the last quarter of 2012 to the same quarter last year. This included over 1.5 billion posts on Facebook, approximately 240 impressions on that social network, in addition to 500 million unique social networking site visitors and 6.3 billion Facebook social engagements (which includes likes, shares, and comments). The Adobe Marketing Cloud was used for the paid social data.

The report that Adobe produced based on its analysis concluded that social media marketing is proving to play an exceptionally important role in the formation of the digital marketplace as well as in the way that consumers are being engaged by their favorite brands. That company feels that a more thorough understanding of these trends – regardless of whether they involve Facebook ads, Twitter links, or Pinterest retail placements – will help marketers to be able to improve the success of their campaigns.

Some of the more interesting data from the study also showed that there was a 340 percent year over year increase in the RPV from Tumblr, a 244 percent increase in the RPV from Pinterest, 131 percent from Twitter, and 72 percent from Facebook. This has revealed that when it comes to social media marketing, the ever-dominant Facebook is now starting to see some heavy competition moving in.