Twitter’s Adam Bain Explains The Concept Behind “Buy Now” Tweets

Adam Bain, Twitter’s President of Global Revenue, promised new advertising products as well as explaining how the company plans to make money with its new “Buy Now” e-commerce button during his talk at the Web Summit conference in Dublin.

In a conversation with Richard Eyre of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, Bain talked about Twitter’s impressive revenue numbers for its latest quarter:

• $361 million revenue in Q3
• 114 percent revenue growth year-over-year
• international revenue up 176 percent year-over-year

Bain told the audience that Twitter understands that it must prove to retailers that it can generate sales. He further explained that Twitter is expanding its current advertising offerings as well as planning new initiatives to be launched in the near future. “We feel like we’re just getting started,” said Bain. “There’s a number of products coming in the next year.”

However, there remains a great deal of uncertainty throughout the marketing industry about whether or not social media sites are the best place for e-commerce. Bain spoke to this concern by explaining his view that it will be successful provided that the social network correctly identifies when to show the “Buy Now” button to users.

“People are tweeting about products and services, but there’s a big distance between that and actually making a purchase,” Bain explained. “American Express and Amazon have already brought e-commerce closer to tweets [through hashtags]. We saw this as a great organic experience, and we decided to shrink that experience. If you’re tweeting about a product or service, a button shows up and you can one-click to buy.”

Bain made it clear that Twitter recognizes the great importance of determining exactly when to have that button appear. “We’re experimenting with different products and price points, and most importantly what emotions do you need to find to generate a sale. What we do is monetize emotions,” he said.

Twitter’s testing of the “Buy Now” button is still in its early stages, with a small number of brands, artists and non-profits being involved, including Home Depot, Eminem, Brad Paisley, The Nature Conservancy and a few others. Bain explained to the Web Summit audience that this e-commerce experiment fits in properly with Twitter’s overall approach to advertising and revenue. Whether or not the “Buy Now” button proves to be successful and becomes widespread is yet to be seen.

Bain further explained the rationale behind Twitter’s specialized plan to the audience during his talk. “When we started the ad business four years ago, the idea was to build a business that makes us proud,” Bain said. “We decided to bring an ad product that was more organic and native to Twitter. We could’ve done banner ads like everyone else and grown revenue much quicker. But our ads look and feel just like the organic content. It respects the user.”