CheapTweet Blog

Note: This post is part of our holiday sponsorship by Best Buy. Though this is part of an official sponsorship, this content is completely our own.

Have you heard of the Twelpforce? It’s Best Buy’s Twitter-based customer support service.

The Twelpforce’s Twitter account describes itself as “a collective force of Best Buy technology pros offering tech advice in Tweet form.” It’s a giant Twitter account run by actual Best Buy employees who can answer customer questions, help make purchasing decisions and just generally be available when customers need them.

Best Buy employees can voluntarily add their Twitter accounts to the Twelpforce and then whenever they tweet with the hashtag #twelpforce, their tweets become part of the @Twelpforce Twitter account. So, the Twitter account is run by numerous actual Best Buy employees, from all across their stores.

We think the Twelpforce is a great idea. Best Buy employees – Blue Shirts – have the hands-on knowledge and experience that allows them to answer customer questions. And there are lots of times when I might want to ask a question about a product before physically going into a store or making a purchase online. Twitter is a great channel for that. We also think it reflects well on Best Buy that they would trust their employees and let them tweet on Best Buy’s behalf.

How do I use the Twelpforce?

Getting your questions answered by a member of the Twelpforce is really easy. Just log into your Twitter account and tweet your question, starting with @Twelpforce. One of the Twelpforce employees will see it and reply to you. That’s it. It easy, fast, and free. You should try it next time you have a question about a gadget or some electronics. For example, it might be helpful if you’re trying to decide what to get someone this holiday season. Hint, hint.

Plus, the Twelpforce made these fun caroling videos (you can watch them all here).

So, if you have any questions about gifts this holiday season, ask the Twelpforce! And be sure to check out all of Best Buy’s great deals on electronics.

Great news! We’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with Best Buy for the holiday shopping season. You may remember that we did something like this in August for back to school.

Throughout the months of November and December, we’ll be engaging in conversations on Twitter, sharing good deals and ways Best Buy can save you money this holiday season.

As you know by now, we work very hard to find and share with you the very best deals. To do this, we often work with sponsors we think will be valuable to you, our users. We have lots of respect for Best Buy, and admire their social media efforts. We’re very excited to be working with them again.

We want to be clear when we’re engaging in sponsored activities, whether it’s here on the blog or on Twitter. All the tweets that are part of this partnership will be clearly labeled as sponsored – we’ll include the hashtag #BestBuyHoliday so you’ll know something is a sponsored tweet. And we’ll clearly label blog posts, as well. We won’t be posting pre-written marketing messages, but we will be passing along information given to us by Best Buy to help you make informed purchasing decisions and hopefully save you some money on your holiday shopping.

We’re all about saving at CheapTweet. Usually it’s money, but this time we’re saving you something that may be just as valuable: characters in your tweets. If you follow @CheapTweet on Twitter (and you should!) then you’ll notice that today Jenn started sharing URLs that start with http://chpt.me – like http://chpt.me/250fr5h. We used to use URLs like http://cheaptweet.com/t/250fr5h but these just weren’t short enough – you can only do so much in 140 characters – so we’ve shaved off 9 characters with these new links.

But it’s not just us… You can use the new short links too. Check out how below. Now whenever you share a link to a tweet from CheapTweet, you can use these 9 extra characters for anything you like. Enjoy!

Use our Share on Twitter tools to, well, share on twitter

Share any deal on CheapTweet just by clicking "Share".

Happy tweeting! Use your 9 new characters wisely.

Hi, Hayes here. I wear a lot of hats at CheapTweet and one of them is making sure all the behind the scenes code and servers work so that CheapTweet works well for you. I’m interrupting Jenn’s regularly scheduled blogging to bring you a quick note about a big change we made to CheapTweet last night.

You see, we’ve been growing at an awesome clip. Our traffic is 600% higher than it was at the start of the year and we’re pulling in more than 10,000 new deals from Twitter every single day. This is all great news and we want to say thank you to all of you out there for making it possible. The only problem was that we were getting too big for our servers.

Last night we fixed that. We moved our systems to a shiny new set of servers that can handle a ton more traffic. The great part is, you don’t have to do a thing. Just keep coming to CheapTweet.com to find the most unique social deals out there. But the best part is, now that we have all this new capacity we’re going to be adding new features at a much faster pace. Look for a bunch cool stuff coming out just in time for the holidays.

If you’re interested in a few of the technical details… read on. If not, you can safely get back to finding great deals.

Up until last night CheapTweet was hosted on a single large slice by the great guys over at Slicehost. This single-server architecture just wasn’t going to support our growth. After looking at our options, our team made the decision that the Rackspace Cloud Servers offered us the best performance for the price. We’re now running on a load-balanced, multi-server setup at Rackspace with a redundant database. This new infrastructure combined with the flexibility of Rackspace Cloud Servers allows us to easily add (or subtract) capacity as our site grows and we add new capabilities.

For those of you who might be interested in the tools we use behind the scenes at CheapTweet, I’ll give you a quick overview. CheapTweet is a Ruby on Rails application. We use BackgroundRB for background processing, beanstalkd for queuing, memcached (of course) and the fantastically fast Sphinx for text searches. We’re load balancing using nginx and HAproxy and we run the app using Passenger.

Hope you’ve enjoyed this little technical digression. Thanks for using CheapTweet. We can’t wait to use this new infrastructure to build really cool new stuff for you.