American Express is to offer cardholders the ability to sync their plastic to Twitter so that when they tweet using special offer hashtags, couponless savings are loaded directly to their cards.
Cardmembers can tweet their way to savings by linking an eligible American Express card with Twitter at sync.americanexpress.com/twitter.
The card scheme has created @amexsync, an automated notification handle that is activated when someone sends a Tweet that includes one of the special offer hashtags. The handle detects if a user is already synced and either confirms their offer enrollment or provides an enrollment link to join the scheme. Additionally, if an offer is no longer available, @amexsync will direct users to check out the Tweets @americanexpress has "favourited" to find the latest offers. Questions or additional assistance will be provided by @askamex, the American Express customer service team on Twitter.
Merchants participating in the programme - which will be rolled out at SXSW in Texas next week - include 1-800-Flowers, Best Buy, Century 21 Department Store, The Cheesecake Factory, Dell, FedEx Office, FTD, Gulf, H&M, McDonald's, Seamless.com, Sports Authority, Ticketmaster, Virgin America, Whole Foods Market and Zappos. American Express says it will provide merchant partners with detailed reporting about the online and offline spend behavior of their customers.
Ed Gilligan, vice chairman, American Express, comments: "American Express is turning Twitter content into commerce by connecting cardmembers to merchants and delivering real world value to both."
At SXSW, AmEx cardholders who use the #AmexAustin10 hashtag will qualify for a $10 city-wide offer which they can spend in participating merchants in Austin from March 9 to March 13. Limit one statement credit per Cardmember.
"Every day, millions of people use Twitter to get special offers from the brands and retailers they care about," says Adam Bain, Twitter's president of global revenue. "Now, American Express is making it even easier for people to act on those offers simply by sending tweets with special offer hashtags from retailers. It's exciting to see American Express build on Twitter in a way that benefits both consumers and retailers."
American Express last month partnered with Twitter to give away $1 million in free advertising to small businesses who sign up for a new promotional service on the microblogging Web site which is scheduled to launch late March.