• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, May 22, 2013

Twitter began testing a lead generation tool Wednesday in its tweet stream that resembles a cross between a daily deal alert and call-to-action ad in search engine query result pages. It serves up in one of Twitter's Cards, the expandable display unit that allows brands to attach photos or other media.

Advertisers can offer Twitter users deals and discounts in the ad unit or in-stream landing page. Those that claim the special simple click the button. Their name, @username, and email address are already automatically fills in the card. The unit forwards the user's Twitter ID and email to the brand advertiser who fulfills the deal.

Tests were done with New Relic (@newrelic), Full Sail (@fullsail), Priceline (@priceline), and Barista Bar (@baristabar). All claim to have received positive feedback about how it helps to drive deeper connections with consumers, according to Mitali Pattnaik, product manager at Twitter. He said that beta participants found Twitter's Lead Generation Card instrumental in driving a lower cost per lead compared with other technologies in their marketing tool kits.

Determining the best ways to generate new leads continues to become a focus for social media sites, although the expertise historically resides with search engine marketing and email marketing. Company and brand marketers generating leads from Google search engine result pages triggered by queries have noted similar results in the past.

Silverpop, which ties together marketing automation, email, mobile, and social, runs a lead-generation campaign in Google search engine results pages. It states a call to action for sign-ups to a marketing newsletters.  

“The technology is still evolving, but it’s another way for marketers to reach potential customers," said Silverpop director of product strategy Bryan Brown. "For people researching your company, the option to quickly subscribe to your newsletter without navigating a site makes the user experience much simpler.”  

Earlier this month, startup Purple Cloud began testing a social, mobile lead-generation platform that founder Josh Shatkin-Margolis claims to change the way that consumers interact with brands and retailers. Similar to Google's and Twitter's tools, this technology generates leads through consumers interacting with the brand's Web site or mobile app after being downloaded to a device.