Name: Tech Debate- Twitter Button
Uploaded: 2014-09-11
Duration: 2 min 27 s
Description: Tech Debate- Twitter Button

[ MUSIC ] This week, Twitter announced that it would begin testing a buy button on tweets in its stream. Erin, would you buy something on Twitter? Here's a thing that's always driven me crazy about social commerce. It's been promised for years. But it has been executed terribly, especially on Facebook. They had to kill Beacon, because it creeped people out. Yeah. Then they had F Commerce, which was an utter failure. Retailers hated it. Mm hm. Then they had Facebook gifts, which was super awkward. It was, like, happy birthday to your friend. Send him a $ 5 Starbucks gift card. Really tacky. So I'm not sold on social commerce yet. Yeah. Well Twitter has to be right? So here's the thing, on it's recent earning's call, Twitter's Chief Executive **** Costello made mention of the fact that its revenues are growing. That's great right? Advertising Sure, sure. dollars are up. Here's the problem. Coming from one place. Right and, and, and the other thing is they're spending way more than they're making, right? Their expenses are way out of line with their revenues. And they're deeply unprofitable still, so they're looking for revenue streams. Correct. You believe this one's gonna work? And so, the, well, they're so in, invested in this if they're willing to change their entire product. Yeah. The problem with Twitter commerce is that Tweets, you know, float by. The half life of a tweet is six seconds or something like that. Right. So for me to consider a purchase and hit buy, that's a, that's a big ask. So Twitter has actually changed its speed so that way there going to have more algorithmic things offered and that upset a lot of users so their willing to make that change just to make commerce work. Yeah and its interesting a its Twitter has also reported during its earnings call that its engagement is up. Which is really good, they're trying to monetize this user. But at the same time, their user base is not growing quite as fast as they want it to. It should be interesting to see how they change this product. Right, I mean one thing that they're doing, is that they're starting really small. And so they're got digital purchases of you know, MP3's. Things that are very easy to buy on impulse. And there are, there are 19 venders a, a, among them the, the musician Rihanna and Eminem. We've got Home Depot, if you want to buy a, a nail gun, or, or Burberry if you want to buy an impulse trench coat. [ LAUGH ] Right, and that's gonna be a challenge for them is to see if people will actually buy, make big, important purchases like that. On Twitter. And one way that retailers are going to be doing that, or least Twitter's hoping. Yeah. Is that they'll invest more in promoted tweets and serving these buy button tweets to their users, so that way people will have a better chance at actually seeing something and buying it. And they need that revenue, right? [ LAUGH ] Yeah. For one show you can always retweet. Come to Fortune. com for more Tech Debate.