Likes and retweets are fine, but the new buzz word at Facebook and Twitter seems to be “buy.”
Facebook announced on Thursday that it has begun testing a Buy button that appears on ads and Page posts from a select group of businesses in the U.S. In effect, that means users can now purchase products advertised by these businesses without leaving the social network.
Just a few hours later, Twitter announced that it had acquired CardSpring, a payments infrastructure company, to help with its goal of bringing “in-the-moment commerce experiences to our users.”
The fact that both announcements were made public so close to one another may have been coincidence, but it highlights the overlapping commerce ambitions of Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook has experimented with payments in the past with mixed results. It briefly offered a virtual currency called Credits and launched a gift shop only to kill it off and re-open something similar in 2012. Facebook also accepts payments in games.
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