The idea was to use Twitter as our loyalty card.

It’s as simple as that, and we were surprised no one had thought about it before.

People would tweet their coffee, we would then reply with a stamp and a message of thanks from the barista. If they did this three times they would be rewarded with a free coffee, delivered via a direct message.

We launched our Twitter loyalty card for a test period on a single cart in London’s Canary Wharf with signage to drive uptake.

We set up an automated process where images were validated with a combination of cloud-based artificial intelligence (to recognise the coffee cup) and marker detection technology (to check for our logo).

Customers were then sent a virtual loyalty card over Twitter that customers could retweet and share. Once customers had tweeted 3 photos they were sent a unique code via DM and their counter reset. This process was also entirely automated.

The entire project was built in less than 2 weeks (backend, image validation APIs, and loyalty card images for Twitter).

After a week, the initial results of our test are positive:

- We have seen a 2.5% uptake of coffees sold being posted on to Twitter

- This means approximately 150 pieces of social media content generated for free with the reach that comes from this estimated at over 15000.

- Increased level of positive interaction between the barista and customers

It is due to run for one more week before we stop to review for continuation and improvements.