Social Media Training for Marketers

American Express cardmembers and merchants can register to use the platform on a first-come, first-serve basis and also receive $100 in advertising credits to put toward bidding on promoted tweets and promoted accounts

The company is also focused on reaching the market for its political ad products and scaling its international ad offerings.

(Twitter currently allows for city-level targeting at its most specific.)

Last April, Gamestop Corp. (GME) opened a store on Facebook to generate sales among the 3.5 million-plus customers who’d declared themselves “fans” of the video game retailer. Six months later, the store was quietly shuttered. Gamestop has company. Over the past year, Gap Inc., J.C. Penney (JCP) Co. and Nordstrom (JWN) Inc. have all opened and closed storefronts on Facebook Inc.’s (FB) social networking site.

“We just didn’t get the return on investment we needed from the Facebook market, so we shut it down pretty quickly,” Sheetz said in a telephone interview. “For us, it’s been a way we communicate with customers on deals, not a place to sell.”

“It was basically just another place to shop for all the stuff already available on the retailer websites,” Gerten said. “I give so-called F-commerce an ‘F.’”