Tracking the Success of Twitter and Amazon’s “Tweet to Buy” Partnership

Recently Twitter teamed up with Amazon to offer a new social shopping experience for Twitter users called Tweet to Buy.

How it works is simple but brilliant. First you link your Twitter and Amazon accounts at amazon.Com/AmazonCart. Then, whenever you spot a tweet with an Amazon product link in your Twitter feed, all you need to do is reply to that tweet with the hashtag #AmazonCart (or #AmazonBasket for users in the UK) to add that product to your Amazon shopping cart. Users are then notified via email and a reply tweet from @MyAmazon to confirm that product has been added to their shopping cart.

Amazon emphasizes the convenience factor of this new feature; users can shop for Amazon products without ever having to leave their Twitter feeds. Tweet to Buy products get saved in a user’s cart indefinitely until he or she decides to complete the check-out process on Amazon.com or in Amazon’s mobile application.

However, using #AmazonCart is a public broadcast of what you are shopping for on Amazon as well as free advertising for Amazon and their merchants — and I was curious whether or not Twitter users would willingly embrace this kind of behavior in full view of their followers.

Is #AmazonCart working?

So, over the last couple of months I’ve tracked Tweet to Buy’s success. Straight out of the gate it showed a strong start with #AmazonCart being tweeted, retweeted, or mentioned around 45,000 times during the first two days, mostly due to discussion about the news item. Two weeks after launch, the initial flurry of chatter around Tweet to Buy was seemingly being replaced by actual user adoption. During that time Simply Measured reported on its blog that an #AmazonCart promotion for a Kindle-edition romance novel was shared 1159 times, which was a not-insignificant amount of traction.

But over the last four weeks, user engagement has slowly continued to decline. #AmazonCart is still getting regular attention, but hasn’t seen a spike over 10,000 Tweets per day since May — and on the average, lately, seems to be hovering more around 5,000 Tweets per day. Here’s a chart from Topsy that tracks the analytics between June 3 and July 3:

Social commerce could still be the future

Social shopping could be very beneficial for Amazon and their merchant partners to help promote products and increase conversions. But in order for it to be a true success, Twitter users also have to be fully on board and excited about sharing their intended purchases with their followers.

Will Twitter users get there? It’s too early to tell for sure. If they do, Tweet to Buy will ultimately prove to be a huge key for marketers in harnessing the power of social for businesses both big and small. In the meantime, we’ll be watching to see where this goes.