Retail Week Live: Amazon uses Twitter to target its Prime shoppers

No comments

Twitter’s European vice-president said retailers including Amazon and Marks & Spencer used the social platform to advertise to shoppers.

Twitter boss Bruce Daisley said the importance of video to mobile users was growing exponentially, with the amount of video watched on mobile devices up thirteen-fold last year from 2010 and expected to increase 220 times over by 2019.

Twitter's Bruce Daisley at Retail Week Live

“If retailers want to stand out on mobile, they need to examine what they’re doing with video,” said Daisley.

Twitter is repositioning itself as a platform that retailers can use to advertise to their customers and Daisley said the platform used its customer data to find peak times for different products to be advertised.

The social media platform examined customer behaviour based on key words and found that retailers that wanted to advertise health-driven products would see the best customer response at the beginning of the week.

Daisley said: “We spoke to a sports retailer that wanted to know when people were most receptive to go for a run, which presumed it would be a Sunday morning – in fact, peak discussion occurs on Monday evening.

“Examining the data in conjunction with people’s comments can give really clear insight into when to target our users with retail advertising.”

Targeted advertising

Twitter has 15 million users in the UK and can target shoppers with adverising based on their location.

Daisley said the social platform had been working with Amazon to create a “hyper local advert” for its Prime customers.

“Using our platform, Amazon can target users within certain postcodes as a really simple way to drive their sales,” said Daisley, adding that bricks-and-mortar retailers like Marks & Spencer used its tareted advertising “to drive footfall in store”.

Daisley concluded that Twitter was increasingly popular for retailers as a customer service platform.

To drive this capability, Daisley said the social media website is introducing messaging capabilities that will allow retailers to move Twitter interactions with shoppers into private message so that they can quickly and securely share their account details and personal information.

Daisley said: “We tested with Apple on this service and will be expanding it for other retailers in the next few months.”