Twitter Offers
Yesterday, Twitter announced on their blog the roll-out of ‘Twitter Offers’, offers to get discounts at various retailers. These offers will show up in your Twitter timeline, and with a single click you’ll be able to save the offer to your linked credit or debit card. The discount will come in the form of a statement credit. This is part of Twitter’s entrance into e-commerce by allowing purchases to be made directly on Twitter.
It doesn’t sound like these offers will be available to all, as it works with Amex Offers. Rather, it will be similar to advertisements which show up based on your searches and tweets. Probably similar to the way Google sends you an ad with a coupon to a certain retailer based on your searches.
It’s unclear if any offers are out there yet, or if it’s just an announcement. The announcement seems to be addressing retailers more than it’s addressing all of us. They’re trying to round up retailers to join the Twitter Offers program.
How to Get an Offer
There’s not much known yet about Twitter Offers, but it should be simple to ‘get targeted’ for an offer, by sending out some tweets about that particular retailer. For example, if you hear about a Starbucks offer, you can send out some coffee tweets, or you can contact @Starbucks, and hopefully the system will send you the targeted offer.
This would mean that once one person (read: blogger) sees a good offer, everyone else can hopefully get targeted with little effort. Of course, this could all be wrong, so we’ll have to wait and see how it develops.
Is This News?
It should definitely be a nice way of getting coupons without having to clip anything. And it will probably be a good way of getting discounts at various retailers.
Beyond that, we’ll really have to see how this works. The beauty of Amex Offers is that the statement credit and the retailer are separate entities; the retailer can’t restrict which items trigger the statement credit. As such, we have lots of success buying gift cards at a discount using Amex Offers. (The occasional exception is gift card purchases online, or e-gift card purchases online.) Buying a gift card can help perpetuate a good offer, and can sometimes be a moneymaker by buying Visa gift cards or by buying other gift cards and reselling them.
The question remains whether Twitter Offers will work similarly. Amex is the credit card processor, so they automatically ‘know’ about any purchase that was made. In the case of Twitter Offers, it’s probably the merchant who will submit the information to Twitter that John Doe made a purchase. It’s possible that it will be more feasible for them to code gift card purchases not to work or to code the Twitter Offer not to work when there’s a different coupon applied.
Double Dip
If this does turn out useful, there’ll be the chance that we can even double-dip with Twitter and Amex together. If there’s an Amex Offer and a Twitter Offer at the same merchant, we may be able to take advantage of both with one purchase.
Another possibility would be to double-dip with a physical coupon along with the Twitter discount.
Discover Deals
On this topic, we’re seeing now a move by Discover to perhaps try to mimic Amex Offers as well. Discover advertises that “ShopDiscover is becoming Discover Deals“. Discover Deals has some in-store offers, besides the regular online portal. Some of the offers work exactly like Amex Offers by giving the discount as a statement credit.
I don’t know if these in-store offers are brand new, or if they’ve been around for some time, but in any case Discover seems to be doing some re-branding there, so we can hope for positive changes. There isn’t anything useful to me right now, but it’s worth keeping an eye on to see if they put out a worthwhile offer.
Developing…
HT: MaximizingMoney
