American Express Launches Twitter Shopping, Buy Through Hashtags!
Have you ever skimmed your Twitter feed and thought, wow, if only I could buy an Amazon Kindle just by replying to a Tweet? No? Me, neither. But American Express is making it happen anyway.
Starting Monday, AmEx customers who sync their cards can buy items if they use the right hashtag. The first such item is a $25 AmEx gift card, which will go for $15 if you tweet #BuyAmexGiftCard25. Other offers will be rolled out on Wednesday Feb. 13 at noon EST including an Amazon Kindle Fire HD for $149.99 (a $50 discount), an Xbox Controller for $29.99 (a discount of about $10) and an Xbox 360 4GB console with a three-month Xbox LIVE Subscription and two game tokens for $179.99 (which is the price of the console without those extras.)
If consumers opt for those items and use the correct hashtags, then they will get a verification from @AmexSync, which will contain a confirmation hashtag. Cardholders then have 15 minutes to tweet the confirmation hashtag to confirm their purchase. If they do so, the item will be shipped to their home within two days for free.
That could generate a chunk of payments for Twitter if it takes a slice of those purchases. But the service, with more than 200 million users worldwide, is also beginning to ratchet up prices for reaching users: last week it raised the price of a “promoted trend” – visible to many users as they look to see what topics are generating the most interest – to$200,000 per day.
Twitter generated an estimated $350m in revenues in 2012, and its growth and increasing interest among advertisers seeking to place promoted tweets and trends could double that in 2013.
