Twitter and American Express Enter the E-Commerce Arena

Twitter and American Express have announced yesterday that they will be joining forces and entering into the e-commerce world. The announcement is a new and interesting next step for social media and its clients. Now you can purchase something with a hashtag as long as you have an American Express card. How does it work? Well, there are two easy steps. When you find an offer that you are interested in you tweet the hashtag for that product. Then American Express will send you an email that contains a confirmation hashtag. When you tweet the confirmation hashtag your Amex will be charged and the item will be shipped to your billing address. The best part for Twitter, American Express, and the company who sold the product is that the hashtags just advertised for them. Now instead of walking down the city street with the bag from the store you just visited, all of Twitter will be able to see your ad. This is great for businesses and small businesses that deal with American Express, but is not yet serving the nonprofit sector.

  This conjured up many new ideas for how nonprofits can use this new e-commerce venture. In the world of nonprofits, this appears to open new doors.  Many nonprofits have a section on their website where donations can be made over the web. After Hurricane Sandy, the Red Cross and other charities used text-to-donate strategies to make it easier for people to help out monetarily. My suggestion is that nonprofits can use this new strategy with Twitter, and let each tweet of a donation, or of a gift be an advertisement (a free advertisement, at that). With each tweet, retweet, and donation hashtag the nonprofit grows its reach, and the viral nature of donating and helping can be fostered in a social media setting. Although, as of this blog post Twitter is exclusively using American Express and is not pushing into the nonprofit/donation sector yet, it appears to be the next great frontier for these and small businesses in the future. If they build it, will your small business or nonprofit use it? ~Josef