Twitter debuts new Lead Generation Cards

Steven Loeb · May 22, 2013 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/2f9c

These cards lets brands and businesses register new users directly from Twitter

In an effort to further expand its advertising revenue, Twitter has introduced Lead Generation Cards, a new type of card that gives businesses and brands a way to sign up new users from within a tweet, it wasannounced in a blog post Wednesday.

"Twitter Cards let you bring rich experiences and useful tools to users within an expanded Tweet. The Lead Generation Card makes it easy for users to express interest in what your brand offers. Users can easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form," Mitali Pattnaik, Product Manager of Revenue at Twitter, wrote.

Here's how it works: the business or brand will put an offer inside of a tweet. The user's name, @username, and email address will already be pre-filled within the Card. All the user has to do is simply click a button and the information will be sent directly, and securely, to the business.

So far the feature has been tested on three brands: New Relic, Full Sail and Priceline. According to Twitter the feedback has been "positive."

You can see an example of how a Lead Generation Card works below:

Need a hotel deal? Sign up now and priceline will email you a 10% Off Express Deals Coupon Code! cards.twitter.com/cards/c9frv/1h
— Priceline.com (@priceline) May 21, 2013

"Additionally, many beta participants found the streamlined nature of the Lead Generation Card was instrumental in driving a low cost-per-lead compared to other technologies in their marketing suite," said Pattnaik.

Lead Generation Cards are being made available to Twitter's managed clients at first, and it plans to launch this them globally, as well as to small- and medium-sized businesses, in the near future.

Twitter monetization

Twitter introduced Twitter Cards in June of last year as a way of allow for the embedding of more content into an expandable tweet. The feature allows developers to attach "cards" to their tweets that will display content such as headlines, photos, and articles from around the web.

In April, Twitter added three new types of Cards:

App Cards, which will show information about an app, including the name, icon, and description, along with other details like rating or price.\
Product Cards, which will represent products by showing an image and description, along with up to two customizable fields that let the developer display more details such as price or ratings
Gallery Cards, which represent an album or collection of photographs via a preview of the photo gallery. This card indicates to a user that a gallery has been shared, rather than just one individual photo. Users are able to specify up to 4 different images to show in the gallery card and can also provide attribution to the photographer of the gallery.

Twitter launched these new cards with a series of new partners, including: Delectable, Etsy, Flickr, Foursquare, Gumroad, Jawbone, Path, Rovio's Angry Birds, SoundCloud, Storenvy, Wine Library and Vine.

The ultimate goal of cards is so give brands and businesses a way to reach a broaded audience. And Twitter's monetization strategy, which also includes a redesigned resource for businesses to learn how to user Twitter, as well as a new API that is designed make it easier for brands to manage campaigns and get more value out of advertising, seems to be working.

Market researcher eMarketer reported in March that it is projecting Twitter to grow revenue by 63% to nearly $1 billion in advertising sales by 2014.

By 2015, Twitter is expected to pull in $1.33 billion in worldwide ad revenue. In September, eMarketer had projected that the network would take in $807.5 million in 2014, but has now revised that number to $950 million.

More importantly, more than half of the networks ad revenue, roughly 53%, is projected to come from mobile this year, and that number is expected to top 60% by 2015. The report estimates that Twitter will earn $308.9 million in mobile ad revenue in 2013, more than double the mobile ad revenue of $138.4 million the year prior.

(Image source: https://edudemic.com)