Susan Dickenson

Retailers: power your 'specials' with CheapTweet

If you're a retailer and you Twitter, check out CheapTweet, an application that scans Twitter for talk of special deals, discounts, coupons and sales posted by retailers, etailers, shoppers, couponing moms, bargain hunting blogs, etc. – then organizes it all by subject and rank for the benefit of a growing group of online shoppers and bargain hunters.

At first glance, CheapTweet.com is a little overwhelming, so here's a (sort-of) CheapTweet cheatsheet: if you’re a shopper, open up a personal CheapTweet account so you can rate products and save your deal finds; if you’re a seller, read CheapTweet’s “Guidelines for Those with Deals to Tweet."

Basically what the Guidelines tell you is that whenever you're tweeting about your store’s deals, specials and sales, do so in a relevant and engaging way. If you do that, CheapTweet says it will automatically find those tweets and add them to its site (you can also use the #cheaptweet hashtag, but it’s not necessary). Once CheapTweet picks up your tweet, shoppers can rate your “deal” by voting it as a “cheap” deal or a “lame” deal. Deals with lots of “cheap” votes get picked up in the special “Cheapest Tweets” section, the site’s default page.

Here’s an example of what it might do for you, the seller: I, a bargain-shopping mom, am looking for a good deal on a table lamp, so I go to CheapTweet.com and do a keyword search for “lamps.” The result is a list of the Cheapest Tweets on lamps:

- at the top of that list is a tweet from “MomsWhoSave,” a coupon & deals site/freelance copy editor who linked to Lamps Plus’ summer sale  advertisement.

- further down there’s a tweet from a site called DealNews about the GIA Lamp, originally offered at Home Decorators Collection Outlet for $99.99, now on sale for $14.99, with a click-thru to the Home Decorators Collection site to make the purchase.

Both of those lamp tweets were posted by consumer sites. But as a retailer, you can take a more proactive approach by following CheapTweet’s guidelines when tweeting about your special deals, sales and coupon offers… and doing it often.

Ashley Furniture is a good example. A keyword search in CheapTweet for “furniture” resulted in several tweets, one of which (fourth tweet down) was posted by Ashley Furniture’s ShopAshley Twitter site:

A click on “ShopAshley” while on the CheapTweet results page brings all of ShopAshley's tweets about Ashley Furniture’s special deals, discounts and sales into one neat list on a page that looks like this:

You can also search for store/brand twitternames in CheapTweet by structuring the address like this: http://cheaptweet.com/twitterers/ twittername or as in Ashley Furniture's case: http://cheaptweet.com/twitterers/ShopAshley

Last week, the CheapTweet software writers (a company called Appozite) took things a step further with the introduction of CheapTweet Stores, a new program that, for a monthly fee, adds more functionality in the form of branding, advertising, aggregation of multiple Twitter accounts and organization of feeds and results. The first retailer/etailer to take the CheapTweet Store plunge is Overstock.com, and here’s a look at the result:

I couldn’t find the monthly fee for the new CheapTweet Stores program, and would welcome a comment from anyone who might be able to share that information with me. In the meantime, think about following the CheapTweet Guidelines as you tweet about sales, specials and discounts… and let me know if it works.

Posted by Susan Dickenson on June 23, 2009 | Comments (2)