No matter how much you engage with tweets on your timeline, it’ll never be enough for Twitter.
To please advertisers and brands, and encourage further spending, the social media company would love you to be glued to your timeline in every waking moment. Maybe some of you are.
In a bid to drive engagement and bring brands and users closer together, Twitter is now trialing Direct Message Cards — there’s a chance you’ve already seen one on your timeline as a promoted tweet.
The card asks you a question, and from the example below we see it focuses on the kind of place you might like to enjoy a cocktail. Although your answer may well be all of the offered responses, you’ll need to select just one. Doing so flips you into a DM session that could lead to a direct conversation with the brand or the presentation of a video linked to the response you just tapped on. In the example above, two “Bot-Tender” chatbots will show you the best cocktail recipe relevant to the location you selected, while some companies are also using the cards to offer special discount coupons to users.
Of course, if you’ve developed a knack for scooting straight past promoted tweets, then it’s going to have to be a pretty clever ad that catches your eye and prompts you to respond, which is very much what Twitter — and the advertiser — would like you to do.
Twitter is currently testing Direct Message Cards with select brands, though ultimately it’s users’ level of engagement that’s likely to determine whether they end up getting offered to more businesses, all of whom are extremely keen to engage with Twitter’s 328 million users.