The social media platform is making it even easier to buy stuff.
If you’re the type of person who wants to hear about the latest iPhone or Playstation before it even launches, Twitter (TWTR) – Get Twitter Inc. Report just made it easier for brands to tell you about it.
The new feature that Twitter announced on June 8, Product Drops, is an expansion of the shopping feature that the social media platform has been trying to grow since the summer of 2021.
Launched on March 9, Twitter Shops lets stores and individual sellers display up to 50 of their products on their profile.
What In The World Is Product Drops?
As an expansion of Shops, Product Drops is designed for teasing products that have not yet launched. Users who follow a certain merchant are now able to click on a product and select the “remind me” option to get notified when it becomes available.
The same roll-out panel will give potential buyers information like product description, cost and ways that they can order it.
“We’re excited to give shoppers a way to do more than just talk; with Product Drops, we’re making it easier to go from conversation to product discovery to purchase,” Justin Hoang, staff product manager at Twitter, said in a blog post announcing the new feature.
The change may seem fairly minor since the commerce feature is already used by a very small number of Twitter accounts.
Given the fact that the notification will come 15 minutes before an item drops, it will mostly be useful for items that a user already knows instead of helping users see new items they might like.
It may be most useful for items that sell out fast — Dior (CHDRF) , Home Depot (HD) – Get Home Depot Inc. (The) Report, and clothing company Union Los Angeles are some of the first brands to make this feature available.
The notification will allow users to click to go straight to the product’s page on the site for purchase.
“When a brand you love is launching something, you want to be first in line to grab that hot new thing before it’s gone,” Hoang said. “Product Drops is designed with this in mind.”
The entire feature is still in pilot mode and only available to iOS users who are in the U.S. and have Twitter set to English instead of any other language.
Are We All Going To Be Shopping On Twitter Now?
Twitter’s venture in commerce came to the game fairly late. Competitors like Instagram and Facebook already launched similar shopping capabilities years earlier.
“We know people come to Twitter to interact with brands and discuss their favorite products,” Bruce Falck, Twitter’s head of revenue, once said. “In fact, you may have even noticed some businesses already developing creative ways to enable sales on our platform.”
It is still, however, unclear whether Shops offers much other than giving brands and companies another place to market their product.
Since the launch, Shops has had a mostly lukewarm reception among the users themselves — although, given the fact that it’s still so new, that could change with time as the number of people who shop on social media platforms continues to grow.
“I think we would all say that it’s generally speaking a positive for the advertiser,” Ilan Nass, the chief strategist at the marketing agency Taktical Digital, told ModernRetail when Twitter first launched its commerce platform in 2021. “Do we feel that it’s a game changer? I wouldn’t get too excited about it,”
