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AMEX Tweet for Dollars Campaign Garners Early Success

Earlier this week we wrote about American Express and its campaign that allows cardholders to “sync” their AMEX cards to Twitter in order to take advantage discounts being offered by such brands as McDonalds, Whole Foods, Bestbuy, Zappos and others. For those unfamiliar with the program, when cardholders tweet using special offer hashtags – #AmexZappos, #AmexMcDonalds, for example – couponless savings are loaded directly to their synced cards.

We ballyhooed the campaign, questioning whether cardholders would want to pimp themselves out as American Express marketers and suggesting that, if they did, it would only add to the overwhelming amount of TWAM (Twitter Spam) that already exists.

Well, the number of American Express members who chose to participate are impressive, as is the resulting activity. Here are the statistics to date as reported by Visibli, which is keeping a real-time tally:

  • 25,705 members have joined the program (72 new users per hour);
  • 156,415 special offer hashtag messages have been tweeted (286 tweets per hour);
  • $7,051,729 total dollars have been spent;
  • $1,402,625 in discounts have been collected;
  • And the numbers continue to mount!

From all appearances, this is a win-win-win for American Express, its retail partners and Twitter alike. For example, almost 28 percent of those joining the program are new to Twitter. That’s over 6800 people who are now tweeting for the sole purpose of getting discounts.

The big winner in all of this is McDonalds; the company has garnered more than 21 percent of the total, according to Visibli’s stats. I guess the lure of getting a discount on a Big Mac is worth the risk of spamming followers.

While we credit American Express for its innovative approach (The company has done this twice previously using Facebook and Foursquare.), in spite of the short-term success our perspective still holds – we don’t believe this to be a social commerce best practice for the reasons mentioned in the previous post. But, that’s just us. What do you think?

American Express Twitter sync campaign stats

Written by
Dr Paul Marsden
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Digital wellbeing covers the latest scientific research on the impact of digital technology on human wellbeing. Curated by psychologist Dr. Paul Marsden (@marsattacks). Sponsored by WPP agency SYZYGY.