Twitter wants your credit card number

4 ideas for how they might get it this holiday season

Twitter recently announced that it’s testing a “Buy” button on a small percentage of U.S. users.

I was reminded of this when I stumbled across a “Payment & shipping” section while poking around in my Twitter Android app settings.

It’s safe to assume that users who have payment and delivery info filled out are a lot more likely to become people who hit “Buy” on Twitter often.

This probably means someone on the Twitter Commerce product team is thinking hard about how to get people to fill in that credit/debit card number and delivery address for the first time.

I wonder how they plan to incentivize this action. We can probably expect to see a few experiments going into the holiday season.

A few ideas:

1) “Give a Twitter friend the gift of X” Campaign, where both the sender and recipient need to have their details filled out (recipient gets a prompt saying “Your friend Y got you a gift! Fill in your delivery address to see what it is and decide if you want it.”). Many of Twitter’s most active users have surprisingly strong, large networks of loose Twitter friends, many of whom they’ve never met in person before. I could totally see myself getting a small Starbucks gift card for some of my Twitter crushes.

2) “12 Days of Christmas” Countdown: Twitter partners with major online retailers so that at exactly 12 noon EST, everyday, for the 12 days leading up to Christmas, each retailer unveils a major discount on one great item.

3) “Bring holiday cheer to someone in need” Campaign: Twitter partners with major charities. Users see promoted tweets encouraging them to donate $1 to help provide for the vulnerable during the coldest months of the year.

4) Twitter Secret Santa: Also plays on the fact that Twitter power users have strong networks of loose friends. Again, I’d love to surprise some of my Twitter friends with something nice during the holidays.

Originally published at emmanuelquartey.com.