Twitter’s Buy Button Ready For The Holidays

Twitter’s Buy button will be hitting the movie theater scene this holiday season, Mashable reported.

Thorough its Twitter account, AMC Theaters will offer a $30 gift card to buy via Twitter its roughly 251,000 follower by using promoted tweets. People who click a tweet with a Buy button option will be lead to a site to enter credit card information. Here’s the trick though, that electronic purchase will then mail a card to the buyer or the home of a gift recipient. The AMC promotion appears to be a marketing ploy to use the Buy button, but it’s also giving those who purchase the gift card a free popcorn (though some followers appeared to be a bit salty in their replies back about the company not offering a better deal.)

Twitter began testing its Buy button on Sept. 8 with a small number of U.S. retailers. The eventual goal is to release the Twitter-based eCommerce for all its users in 2015. Mixing payment methods into the social media space is a topic of conversation with Twitter and Facebook, but neither company has truly defined its strategy for growing in the eCommerce space. Facebook has talked about integrated payments into its messenger app, though it said recently it likely won’t be getting into payments on its own.

In Twitter’s third-quarter earnings call on Oct. 27, CEO Dick Costolo told investors: “I wouldn’t extrapolate too much from what you’ve seen around the buy now button that we’ve launched on Twitter to any forward-looking expectations.”

“We’re continuing to explore the way we think about in-the-moment commerce and now commerce and the different kinds of opportunities we see in that area and we’ll just continue to play around with exploration there and look at opportunities in that area as opposed to what thinking about what you’re seeing today as what we’re launching permanently,” he also said.