CheapTweet Blog

A recap of the interesting stories and articles we tweeted about in the past week.

First, a bit about what’s new with CheapTweet. Better search, deals in your city, new blog features and more!

Here are some very handy tips from @wisebread on how to keep summer electric bills low.

We discussed a somewhat controversial Slate article about how Etsy might be peddling “a false feminist fantasy”

@SavvyAuntie will be live-tweeting for TNT  during their new show Saving Grace. There’s a good writeup of her sponsored tweeting on Mashable.

We’re trying to learn a bit more about our followers. If you haven’t done it yet, would you mind answering a few brief questions?  It’ll take 30 seconds.

At CheapTweet, we want to make sure we’re tweeting about deals our followers find relevant and interesting. So, in order to get to know you a little better, we wrote up a short survey.

Would you mind answering a few quick questions? It’ll take 30 seconds, I promise.

This survey is completely anonymous and all questions are optional. And we’re not going to sell this info to anyone; we just want to make sure we’re being useful.

Thank you for your help!

A recap of the interesting stories and articles we tweeted about this week.

If you’re new to Twitter, you might want to check out these seven informative Twitter Tutorials on YouTube from Mashable.

Get Elastic asks the question: Is free shipping more attractive than a dollar discount?  The answer? Yes, free shipping is more attractive to most shoppers.

Read our inaugural CheapTweet seller interview with Tracy Owens Chasteen (@polishedtwo), a jewelry designer in Austin, TX.

A big list of 30 deal hunters to follow on Twitter from Savings.com. Actually, there are  others added in the comments, so it’s more like 50 deal hunters to follow.

CheapTweet is free for anyone to use. And it’s always going to be free to get your deals on our site. But if you want more visibility for your deals, we offer several paid ways for you in get your deals in front of more people. Advertising on CheapTweet is easy and affordable. You can now order ads straight from our website.

We’ve made it easy to buy ads, so for a limited time we’re making it easy to get more for your money! For every 1,000 impressions you buy we’re giving away 100 free if you use coupon code CT1002.

How does it work?

1. Go to our advertising page, pick your ad type and click one of the “Buy Now” buttons
2. Click “Enter CheapTweet Coupon Code” on the Review Your Payment page and enter CT1002 into the box and we’ll throw in 100 additional impressions for every 1,000 you buy. Buy 5,000, get 5,500. Buy 10,000, get 11,000!

Advertising on CheapTweet is a bit different than advertising on other sites. We pull our ad text straight from your Twitter profile. This means you need a Twitter account to advertise on CheapTweet. You can choose to promote your Twitter profile with a sidebar ad or a specific tweet with a sponsored tweet.  Examples of both types of ads are shown below.

If you have any questions about advertising on CheapTweet, let us know. And stay tuned, as we’re soon going to be offering lots of new ways to increase your deals’ visibility on CheapTweet.

A recap of the interesting stories and articles we tweeted about this week.

Free food: When KFC of Denny’s gives away free food, logic goes out the window from the Chicago Tribune. Reflections on what people will do for free food.

10 resources for finding free and cheap things to do this summer from the Simple Dollar. Suggestions for inexpensive and fun summer activities.

Twitter proves its worth as a killer app for local business from Advertising Age.  A few powerful examples of local businesses using Twitter for promotion and marketing, as well as Twitter tips for local businesses.

Threadless is crowdsourcing Twitter Tees.  Threadless is printing some of Twitter’s best tweets on t-shirts anyone can submit and vote on ideas.

Recommendations for great baby gifts.  A large list – with links – of gift recommendations for babies and expecting parents.

Credit: journeyscoffee on Flickr

The big news this week was the Super Bowl. This year, the NFL actually setup an official super bowl twitter account. As for during the game itself, Twitter managed to click along fairly well. If you want to see what everyone had to say about the on-field action and the ads, check here and here.

It’s been a bit of a quiet week on the tweet-commerce front. Jenn over at our sister blog, Appozitegeist explains the Thin Mint Effect on Twitter and how retailers and brands can’t afford to ignore it. Mr. Tweet (very handy service, by the way) writes about a coffee shop in Houston that’s used Twitter to double its customer-base. They’ll even take orders via tweets!

Though it’s not strictly Twitter related, I thought I’d share this TechCrunch interview with Robert Kalin, founder of Etsy in Davos. If you can get through Michael Arrington insulting handmade goods, it’s got some interesting stuff about Etsy’s business.

We all know Twitter is a great way to socialize, make contacts and even keep up with the news – all in real time. The same features that make Twitter great for those uses also make it great for distributing and finding great deals on just about anything. That’s why we built CheapTweet.

We see it as part of our mission to help store owners use Twitter to its full potential and help deal hunters track down that great money-saver which stretches their dollars farther. With that, we’re introducing a new regular feature here on the CheapTweet blog to keep everyone informed about the goings on in Twitter-land in general and especially in the brave new world of Tweet-Commerce.

First, let’s start off with some news about Twitter itself. We recently found out that Twitter may have surpassed Digg in total traffic (at least for a week). We also found out that Twitter may be getting even more money from venture capitalists that think it’s worth $250 million. Sounds like they must have a business plan in there somewhere.

We learned a few things about what not to do on Twitter when a user called @astrospace had a very public meltdown, going down raging about Twitter’s customer support. Also, we learned you shouldn’t use Twitter to publicly insult a large customer. Remember, if you say it on Twitter it’s public. It gets shared by followers and indexed on Google. It can and will haunt you forever.

As for doing business on Twitter, I just found the Twitter as a Business Tool blog. He’s selling a book and some other training things that I can’t vouch for but he did recently write a post with 17 reasons your business should be on Twitter. Pretty good stuff there about how Twitter can help your brand.