Jeffrey Steven Kohler

I think this is definitely up and coming – think about now, when you are on facebook and it starts showing ads for things you were looking at over the last couple of days – couple that with location services and twitter and I think it makes a ton of sense.

I think this is a direction that a lot of social media outlets will move towards. There is another website called Living Social that allows users to share stores and products through the site and they offer promotions on select products as well. I also use to work for a retailer that utilized Facebook as a way for customers to save money. They could upload coupons from the site to their typical store discount card or onto the stores app. and it would taken off their bill at checkout. It’s a really interesting topic considering the growth of social media over last decade.

Similar to what Stephanie said, the first thing I thought of was Groupon while reading this article. As we read in our text, Groupon’s largest weakness is that it is easy to copy. I believe the Twitter Offers idea has officially proven this. Groupon does have a certain level of convenience with an e-mail service that “caters” to specific users with offerings, yet for those who frequently use social media it is far more convenient to purchase offers through Twitter Offers than to constantly delete e-mails from Groupon with offers they don’t want or to scroll through the Groupon website searching for one thing they would like to purchase. With Twitter Offers you do not need to be actively pursuing a deal in order to find one from a company you follow. If other companies are pursuing this feature I would recommend they analyze how Twitter offers this features and attempt to improve it or distinguish themselves in their offering of this Social Media E-commerce feature.