Last week, the Miami Dolphins unveiled some throwback jerseys that they will use in their Dec. 14 game against the New York Giants. The jerseys will commemorate 50 years of Dolphins football, beginning with their induction in 1966—but they made their announcement in a way that you can only do with today’s technology.
According to Forbes’ Anthony DiMoro, the Dolphins were the first sports team to utilize Twitter’s “Collections” feature, which allowed them to create their own page on Twitter containing all of the tweets related to their throwback apparel.
You can access the “50th Season Collection” here. It is essentially a web page on Twitter that holds four tweets with information about the throwback jerseys and corresponding apparel. You can tweet about the collection and the Dolphins even have their own corresponding header image.
Commemorating Fifty Seasons, with a nod to our iconic past. See them on MNF – 12/14/15 https://t.co/2FI1b0rIgn
— Miami Dolphins (@MiamiDolphins) July 29, 2015
How this collection differs than the many created by others, like The New York Times, is that it operates a waypoint between Twitter and the Dolphins’ online store. This page offers as an exemplar—it shows the pricing of certain items with a button to access that item in the Dolphin’s store. Twitter users can tweet about the page and tweet about the item. They will show up on that exact page.
This feature, the e-commerce portion of a collection, is still in its BETA phase, so the Dolphins are truly on the forefront of social media being used as an even more overt marketing tool than it already is.
We may begin to see certain companies even foregoing social media as a mere waypoint between item and store. This is the first step in social media sites perhaps becoming marketplaces.