(Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: AP).

Twitter: a platform for fleeting 140-character musings, ill-advised brand chatter and, now, campaign donations.

On Tuesday morning, the social media stalwart announced a new feature, powered by the payment company Square, that allows users to donate to the 2016 presidential candidate of their choice. Per an announcement on Twitter’s blog:

“This is the fastest, easiest way to make an online donation and the most effective way for campaigns to execute tailored digital fundraising, in real time, on the platform where Americans are already talking about the 2016 election and the issues they are passionate about,” the post by Jenna Golden, the company’s head of political advertising sales, said.



The process is pretty seamless. Presidential candidates (all 456,547,474,347 of them) first need to create a Square Cash account under the “business” label and then email the company to let it know they are registered. As soon as both Twitter and Square sign off on the registration, candidates can tweet their unique “$Cashtag” (a feature Square announced in March). The ever-eager Republican candidate Scott Walker was the first to demonstrate:

Photo: Twitter

All tweets with the $Cashtag will include an image with a Contribute button. If you’re cruising Twitter, see one of those tweets and want to throw some money at a candidate, just click it. You’ll be brought to a page where you can fill in whatever amount you want and then enter your debit card number. Feel free to include a happy li’l “optional” note too.

On mobile, the process is even more streamlined: Tap the Contribute button and it’ll open a donation page within the Twitter app itself. There’s no need to create a Square account on either desktop or mobile, though there is an option to save donor information for the future.



So far, Walker, John Kasich, Rick Santorum, Bobby Jindal and Rand Paul have all signed up for the service and tweeted their unique URLs. Whether it turns out that Twitter users are generous benefactors remains to be seen. In general, click-through on Twitter is notoriously low, and it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the politicians who jumped at the opportunity to sign up are also not doing well in the polls.