Monday, March 15, 2010

Twitter as a flyer for online outlet stores

Dell has been tweeting special offers for refurbished equipment since Jan 2008 at twitter.com/delloutlet. As of March 2010, DellOutlet has approximately 1.6M twitter followers. In many ways, DellOutlet on twitter is the online flyer for the Dell outlet store at www.dell.com/outlet. While the flyer's reach is impressive, I wonder if Dell and Twitter doing enough to make the online outlet promotions adequately easy to use and navigate.

Currently on twitter.com/delloutlet, there is no easy way to pull up all the promotions that are currently running. In other words, there is no analog to the handy physical-world paper flyer that we are all used to. Further Dell seems to do promotions on twitter one at a time, sending out a new coupon code every couple of weeks. In comparison, in the physical world, flyers run multiple promotions simultaneously to interest users with diverse needs and tastes.

Thus, Dell seems to use twitter in a very sequential way, faithfully following the usage pattern that has become common amongst twitter users. By limiting itself to such sequential usage, I think that Dell is missing an opportunity to get the full impact from its "early adopter" usage of twitter. Granted there are no existing tools (that I know of) that could convert multiple tweeted offers into a nice online flyer that is always current. However, building such a tool does not seem overly complex. Perhaps this represents a business opportunity for an entrepreneur to get into the "twitter flyer production" business - just as printing companies produce flyers for the physical world.

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