06 Jul Beyond eCommerce: What Twitter Product Pages and Collections Mean for Brands
Following the move of Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram in introducing new functionality and eCommerce ad units, Twitter’s most recent announcement reveals two new features: Product Pages and Collections.
Keep in mind that while many articles have lumped these features together, the two are very different and have different marketing opportunities that can expand beyond “Buy Now” ecommerce functionality. Let’s look at how.
Product and Places Pages
These pages are dedicated to a specific product or place, and contain information such as images, reviews and other various details for those searching. The information retained within these pages can help inform buyers of products before their purchase, while providing integration of ecommerce in a “Buy on Twitter” button.
Product and Places Collections
Collections differ, as they are editable groups of Tweets hand-selected by a Twitter user. They are 
fairly easy to create yourself through Tweetdeck. Twitter has already begun to collaborate on this feature with numerous influencers and celebrities who are using the feature to promote their own product lines. Those users who chose to utilize these features do have the choice of selling directly through Twitter, or driving traffic to their own websites for purchasing. One can view these collections on any user’s page by clicking on the “Browse Collection” button in the top right corner.
What Does This Mean for Your Brand?
Right now, Product/Places pages are still in testing with beta brands, while Collections can begin to be created through platforms like Tweetdeck or Curator.
Let’s look at a few ideas on how Collections could be advantageous for brands:
- Influencer Recommendations: Influencers could be used to create collections of the products they love, providing an easy way for Twitter users to discover a collection of products. Imagine gift guides for the holidays through a collection of tweets.
- Content aggregation: Brands could leverage collections to more easily aggregate tweets around a topic or an event. For instance, Twitter Chats are great ways for brands to spike conversation over a short period of time, but when they are over the conversation often fades away. With Collections in place, brands could aggregate top performing content from these discussions and have a URL to send followers to follow along.
- Trending News/Conversations: If a brand or publisher is producing content around a trending topic, it could thread these into a collection and use the URL as a way to keep followers further up-to-speed on the ongoing status of the news or conversation.
As one last thought to keep you thinking… Could these updates along, with the integration of Twitter search results on Google serve up to make a super ecommerce baby?
