Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today announced that its breakthrough ShoutIt! feature has been enhanced to allow users to publish product reviews, answers, and stories on Twitter. With a single click, consumers can now broadcast their product opinions and experiences on Twitter where they are immediately available to all followers as a simple URL that links back to the site. Retailers and manufacturers gain the ability to extend their brands onto Twitter’s wildly popular microblogging platform and attract new customers and generate additional sales through authentic word of mouth marketing. Twitter has experienced 1,382% growth in the last year, with more than 9 million unique users today.
Research shows that consumers overwhelmingly trust the product opinions and recommendations of friends over expert reviews and advertising. ShoutIt! lets customers share their authentic product opinions with those who matter most to them by extending reviews, stories, and answers content to the places where people go to communicate and share their lives with their friends. These include popular social networks like Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, and MySpace, in addition to Twitter. Other networks can be added on demand for unique client implementations.
“Bazaarvoice is one of the technologies transforming modern commerce by giving companies a measurable and repeatable way to use the voices of their customers to build their businesses,” said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. “We continually innovate to keep our clients in step with consumers and consumers are adopting Twitter at an accelerating pace. ShoutIt! is a great fit: it gives consumers interesting new content to tweet, just like word of mouth but digital, while offering retailers and manufacturers an authentic way to reach millions of people and amplify their return on investment in Bazaarvoice social commerce applications.”
ShoutIt! is a feature that integrates seamlessly onto a Bazaarvoice client’s product page within the review summary, as well as with each specific review. Consumers can click on a ShoutIt! icon to publish any review, product, or answer — their own or someone else’s — to Twitter, Facebook, Digg, del.icio.us, or MySpace. For social networks, the published review includes the retailer’s logo and the review itself, as well as a direct link back to the retailer’s Web site. The enhanced Twitter functionality includes a direct link back to the originating eCommerce site, and users have the option to enhance the tweet with text that doesn’t exceed Twitter’s 140-character limit.
The enhanced ShoutIt! feature is immediately available free of charge for all Bazaarvoice clients. The service requires no additional integration or IT effort and can be up and running in a matter of days.
