Amex unveils ‘tweet-to-buy’ plan

American Express has become one of the first companies to embrace social ecommerce, by rolling out a service which will enable customers to buy goods at discounted rates through their Twitter account.
The ‘Amex Sync’ service, which uses a designated hashtag, follows a similar scheme launched last year, which issued discounts for use in store.
The discount hashtags will be published on American Express’s official Twitter account. Once a customer has registered their Twitter account with Amex, they can then tweet the hashtags to receive a discount on goods, including Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Xbox 360 console.
To date, there have been very few examples of Twitter commerce, although Facebook does run a programme with its own gift scheme. The idea is to use customers’ own social networks to raise awareness of offers and discounts.
Amex senior vice president of digital partnerships and development Leslie Berland said: “Based on the initial success of Amex Sync for offers, we know there is significant power in combining our assets with Twitter’s platform to bring value to card-members and merchants.
“Now, we’re leveraging our unique technology and closed-loop network to introduce a seamless solution that redefines what’s possible in the world of social commerce.”