From Tweets to Transactions: How Your E-Commerce Brand Can Take Advantage of the Shopify and Twitter Integration

November 16, 2022

Shopify and Twitter – A Match Made in Media

Twitter currently boasts 396.5 million users worldwide – 206 million of who access the platform on a daily basis, making it a hotspot for e-commerce brands and consumers alike. From a marketing standpoint, Twitter lets your e-commerce business attract users to your brand through useful content, creation of brand awareness, and connection with your audience in personal and meaningful ways by opening the lines of communications and providing your followers a platform for real conversations. As a matter of fact, according to a survey conducted by Twitter, 76% of people agree that the conversations they have on Twitter are what convinced them to make a purchase. Not only that, consider that while Twitter currently sits at the 5th most popular social media platform in the US, it is the #1 platform for discovery.

According to Twitter, 53% of users are more likely to be the first to buy new products. In the last year alone, shopping-related Tweets saw as many as 40-billion impressions, and with 34% of Twitter’s users earning more than $75,000 annually, a third of the platform’s audience has high spending power – resulting in countless growth opportunities for your e-commerce brand. Pair that with Twitter’s hundreds of millions of users, it should become clear just how enormous the potential is for your e-commerce brand, not only in terms of reaching your target audiences, but by making connections with possible consumers through conversations, creating long-lasting relationships with your customers through those interactions and ultimately generating sales.

Turning Conversations Into Conversions

So how can these conversations turn into conversions for your e-commerce brand? Well, on June 22, Twitter announced its partnership with Shopify – one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the world, holding a 23 percent market share in the U.S. alone. If you aren’t super familiar with Shopify, just know that in 2020, Shopify merchants generated more than $307 billion worldwide. Collectively, Shopify retailers make up the 7th largest company in the world in terms of revenue – that’s more than Apple and Volkswagen – and thanks to this new partnership, all US Shopify merchants will now be able to tap into Twitter to entice users to purchase their products.

In a release, Shopify stated “Twitter’s hundreds of millions of users represent potential connections for independent merchants, and that’s why Shopify is the first commerce platform to partner with Twitter as it continues to scale its Twitter Shopping ecosystem.” The goal of the integration is to boost in-app commerce by allowing Shopify retailers to advertise their products on their Twitter Professional Profiles – which, by the way, are now available to all users. Twitter’s Professional Profiles were originally only available to selected businesses, but now anyone can convert their Twitter profile to its business option without requiring approval from Twitter. This option provides your e-commerce brand access to more display choices, including business hours, location details and business category – just to name a few.

Professionals Needed

While anyone can choose to update their account to a Professional Profile, it’s important to mention that Twitter outlines the following requirements that you must adhere to in order to qualify for a Professional Account:

You must not have a history of repeatedly violating the Twitter User Agreement.
You must have a complete profile with an account name, a bio, and a profile picture.
Your authentic identity must be clear on your profile. Your profile must not feature another person’s identity, brand, or organization, nor does it use a fake identity intended to deceive others. Profiles that feature animals or fictional characters are ineligible unless directly affiliated with your brand or organization. Parody and fan accounts are not eligible for Professional Accounts.

Shopify and Twitter – How Does it Work?

It should come as no surprise that the best way to reach your target audience and promote sales is by putting your products and services in front of your customers and giving them the option to purchase them, right? Well, users now have the ability to tap on a product or service that your e-commerce brand is promoting on your Twitter profile and will be redirected to the Shopify product page to make a purchase.

Your e-commerce brand now has the opportunity to reach consumers on Twitter in two ways:

Display up to five products on your Twitter profile.
Use a pilot feature, called Twitter Shops, that allows your e-commerce brands to advertise as many as 50 products in a tab linked to your profile.

Using Twitter’s new sales channel app, you are now able to easily – and effectively – advertise your e-commerce business, reach your intended audience and drive sales to your brand. Available in the Shopify App Store and on the Shopify admin, Twitter’s sales channel app allows your e-commerce brand to:

Onboard to Twitter’s Shopping Manager

You can now link your e-commerce brand’s Twitter account to your Shopify admin and onboard onto Twitter’s Shopping Manager where you can upload your products and manage your inventory and sales. Through Twitter’s Shopping Manager dashboard, you can access product catalog management tools and manage your profile as you see fit using an array of shopping features available to you. Not only that, by onboarding to Twitter’s Shopping Manager, you will unlock a variety of other free tools designed exclusively for Professional Profiles to help take your e-commerce business to the next level.

Automatically Sync Your Inventory

Twitter’s sales channel app now makes doing inventory easy! The app is designed to regularly sync with your e-commerce brand’s Shopify product catalogs, so you won’t need to manually update the information on Twitter. The Twitter sales channel will automatically sync your Shopify products – with your images, labels and descriptions – to your Twitter profile. Any changes made to your Shopify catalog will automatically update your Twitter Shopping Manager’s catalog, too.

Highlight Your Products & Services

Twitter’s sales channel app allows you to highlight your products and services right on your Twitter profile. With the newly implemented integration, Shop Spotlight and Twitter Shops are now available to all retailers in the US – allowing you to drive users to discover your products, build brand awareness and attract consumers to your e-commerce business. When users are ready to make a purchase, they can checkout directly on your e-commerce brand’s website – it’s as simple as that!

Grow Your Audience

With Twitter’s Ads platform, you can create campaigns designed to help reach your intended audiences to create a following of users who are interested in your e-commerce brand and most likely to do business with you. Interestingly, in April of this year, Twitter reported that the potential audience you can reach with Ads on Twitter sits at 465 million users – opening the door to a world of possibilities for your e-commerce business.

It’s important to note that this function doesn’t extend to tweets specifically – yet. Twitter is currently working on implementing product listings that will display ‘Shop’ buttons in tweets – and although they aren’t available at the moment, they are on the way. So keep an eye out for these upcoming changes because this additional option will provide your e-commerce brand with even more opportunity to grow your business through real-time Tweet conversations.

Ready, Set, Tweet

Twitter’s partnership with Shopify makes the ‘how’ easy, and when it comes to the ‘why’, allow us to break it down even further for you. Consider this – in 2021 alone, it was recorded that 6.5 billion Tweets mentioned businesses globally – that’s a lot of Tweets, right? Well, we should also mention that according to one study, 93% of people that follow small and medium-sized businesses on Twitter plan to buy from them. So, the recent integration of Twitter and Shopify allows your e-commerce business to put your products and services front-and-center for Twitter users who are already engaged in discussions about businesses and products – and plan to buy them! We can help you take advantage of this new partnership so you can drive consumers to your brand by getting your products directly onto Twitter for them to discover, get inspired by and ultimately purchase.

About the author: Alyssa has spent the majority of her career specializing in the Accounting sector of Affiliate Marketing. With a persistent urge to learn new things, Alyssa returned to McGill University in Montreal, Canada in her 30s to study Public Relations and Communications Management where she discovered a passion for writing – and she hasn’t looked back!

Her interests include adventuring in the great outdoors, cooking up a storm, and not sitting still. She aspires to take a million pictures of her Siberian Husky/Saint Bernard mix, Jax, and is probably getting pretty close.