Twitter just announced new capabilities that it says “make it easier to discover products and places.”
The company has been moving into e-commerce and rolled out a Buy button last fall. However, a single tweet may not be the best way to sell a product, especially if you don’t know much about it, so Twitter says it’s starting to create pages around some products to provide more information and content.
Those pages will include multiple tweets, but they’ll also have basic product information — and, yes, the ability to actually make a purchase. Here’s an image of a sample page for Andy Weir’s bestselling book The Martian.
Twitter’s also allowing a limited group of “curators,” including TechCrunch, to create their own collections around different themes. For example, we tweeted a collection of “5 smart kitchen gadgets.” It looks like a normal tweet with multiple images, but when you open it, you get multiple, each one talking about a different gadget. And those tweets, in turn, link to product pages.
Personally, I know very little about kitchens or gadgets (for the record, I wasn’t involved in putting our collection together), so other options include this collection of product recommendations from pop star Demi Lovato or this collection of Game of Thrones-related products.
Twitter’s blog post describes this as a test and adds:
This is just the beginning. In the coming months we’ll be testing more new experiences we hope give you the most personalized and relevant information about the places and things you want to explore.