Another day, another significant product announcement from Twitter. Following on from the unveiling of Project Lightning earlier in the week, Twitter has today announced a new way to find products and shop on Twitter, one that will change the way many businesses utilise the platform as a marketing medium.
In an official announcement on the Twitter blog, Twitter has outlined a new feature called Product and Place Collections. This feature enables businesses to showcase their products on Twitter, even enabling customers to buy direct, on-platform, in some cases.
Product and Place Collections work like this:
When you search for a Twitter profile, if that profile has Product and Place Collections activated, you'll see a new button that says 'Browse Collection' on the front page. This button also appears in the smaller 'Profile Summary' preview screen:
Once clicked, you're taken through to a new profile page of products from 'The Ellen Shop' in this case:
Here, you can scroll through all the products available in Ellen's store, tweet about them to let friends know what's on offer (as seen at the right in the above image), and, if eligible products, buy them right there. Each product listing appears as a tweet with image:
Clicking onto any image will take you to a separate page where you can make a purchase or be taken to a third-party site to complete the transaction:
Another feature here is that you can see what people are saying about that particular item - clicking on the 'Tweets' option at the top takes you to a listing of all the tweets related to this product.:
As you can seen, it's keyword based - the operative words here being 'v-neck' and 'Ellen' or 'ellenshow', so you're going to get some mis-matches, but the addition could provide some additional, valuable insight, particularly if you were to come across review tweets either recommending or warning against the product.
Twitter is launching the new product with 41 partner participants, including Target, Nike, Game of Thrones (HBO) and Beats by Dre. At this stage, Twitter isn't charging retailers to create Product and Place Collections, though it's likely they will at some stage in future - whether that's through a cost per listing or a cut per purchase remains to be seen. It's definitely an interesting new take on Twitter shopping, and adds a whole new element for social media retailers to consider.
Along the same line, Twitter is also launching Product and Place Pages, the same concept, though relates to specific products - here's what it looks like on mobile:
Product and Place Collections and Pages will be accessible via mobile and web and, for launch partners, are active now.