CheapTweet Blog

It’s a very big day in the CheapTweet office. We just indexed our 5 millionth deal tweet! To celebrate monumental tweet #5,000,000, we’re rolling out some awesome new CheapTweet features, including something we’ve very, very excited about – the CheapTweet DealStream. We’ve also enhanced our search engine technology, implemented a new voting mechanism, polished up our site, and got a new logo and a new mascot! Here’s more information about the new CheapTweet.com.

DealStream

We’ve been quietly testing the CheapTweet DealStream for a little while – some of you have been part of our beta test – and now it’s time to share it with everyone. This is a very cool new feature, and we can’t wait for you to try it.

Did you know that we find more than 30,000 new deal tweets most days? That’s a whole lot of deals, and it can be hard to sort through all that to find what you want. This is why we created the DealStream – it’s a personalized and fully customizable stream of only the deals you want to see. There’s a lot more about how to set up your DealStream here. You need a CheapTweet account to use the DealStream, so either sign in or sign up to use it.

Upgraded Search Engine

We’ve made some very useful enhancements to our search engine, which uses specialized algorithms to aggregate tweets about the same deals. This helps you quickly see what deals are popular, reduces duplicate deals on the site, and really helps us sort through spam. Of those 30,000 new tweets we find each day, only about half of them actually make it to the site.

New Voting Mechanism

We’ve removed the It’s Cheap and It’s Lame buttons and replaced them with a straightforward thumbs up and thumbs down button. Just give a thumbs up to the deals you like and a thumbs down to the deals you don’t. Piece of cake.

New Logo and Site Design

One our favorite parts of the new CheapTweet.com is our new mascot. Isn’t this little pig so cute? We’ll be running a contest to help us pick a name for him soon; stay tuned for those details. We’ve got some great prizes for the winner. And in addition to the new mascot and logo, we’ve polished up the way the site looks.

Got any questions about the new features? Let us know! We’re on Twitter and Facebook.

We just launched a very cool new feature on CheapTweet.com – the CheapTweet DealStream. It’s a whole new way to find the deals you’re looking for, making it easier, faster and even more fun than ever before. If you don’t have a CheapTweet account, now’s the time to sign up!

Here’s some more information about how the DealStream works and how to set up your own personalized DealStream.

What is the CheapTweet DealStream?

The CheapTweet DealStream finds the exact deals you want, and delivers them to you right when you want them. The CheapTweet DealStream is a real-time feed of personalized recommendations just for you. You can set your preferences for what kinds of deals you want to see – you can follow certain brands or stores, as well as different kinds of products or keywords.

Every day, we filter through more than 20,000 deal tweets to add more than 10,000 new deals to the site. The DealStream filters through all of these deals – more than 5 million deals overall – to find the perfect deals just for you. It helps you find what you want quickly and easily.

How do I set up my DealStream?

Getting started with the DealStream is simple. You can tweak these settings later, so just pick some to get things started. You’ll need a CheapTweet account to use the DealStream, so go sign up here if you don’t have one already (or sign in to your existing account here).

When you first sign into your account after clicking on the DealStream link, you’ll be taken to the initial DealStream setup page. Setting up your DealStream takes less than a minute.

1. What general categories interest you? Check as many as you like. If you check on a top-level category, like Fashion & Beauty, we’ll automatically fill in the sub-categories. If you’re only interested in one or two sub-categories under a top-level category, just check those.
2. Enter in some keywords to refine your DealStream. You can get as specific as you want here. Type in words or phrases that describe the names of stores, brands, or products you like.
3. Once you’ve entered your preferences, click the “I’m done” button to see the deals we’ve found for you.

You can update these prefences at any time, so you’re not locked into what you set up initially. Play around with it, see what works for you.

How do I make my DealStream smarter?

You can further refine your DealStream in two ways: voting on deals and editing the categories and keywords you selected.

Click the thumbs up button on deals you like. Click thumbs down button on deals you don’t like. When you give a deal the thumbs down, you can also tell us why you don’t like it. Just click on the pink gear that appears when you click thumbs down, then tell us more about why you didn’t like that deal. All this helps us know what deals to show you next time.

At any time, you can edit the categories and keywords you are following. Just click Edit next to categories or keywords and make any changes you’d like.

How do I see my DealStream?

Once you’ve set up your DealStream, you can see the deals it has found for you in several ways. You can always log back into CheapTweet and click on the DealStream button on the top left of the page.

You can also get an RSS feed of your DealStream. Just click on the “DealStream Feed” button on the right side of your DealStream page. Then you can set up the DealStream RSS feed in your favorite feed reader.

We’re updating a few pages on CheapTweet.com to provide more information to CheapTweet visitors. Among other changes, there’s a revamped About CheapTweet page, which includes more detailed information about who we are, recent press mentions, etc…

And, there’s a brand new FAQ and Help page! If you ever have a question about how CheapTweet works or why something isn’t working the way you think it should, check here for answers. We’ll continue to add to this page as we grow. Let us know if you have a question that isn’t currently answered here!

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

Here’s a very useful article with helpful tips for selling crafts online from @interspire.

This week’s seller interview is with jewelry designer @getglam. Vera is amazingly talented – don’t miss this interview!

We got some insight into how to pay as little as possible to insure your jalopy from The Consumerist.

Mashable posted a list of their top 10 Twitter SEO tips. Some of these are very important considerations.

And since CheapTweet is already indexed by the major search engines, we want to make sure your tweets are being found. So we wrote up a few Twitter tips for online retailers.

The CheapTweet team was interviewed on Good Day Austin today (that’s the Austin Fox affiliate’s morning show).  We talked about what CheapTweet is, why cheap is a good thing, and heard from a seller and a shopper.  It was fun (but a bit nerve-wracking to be on live TV, especially so early in the morning)!

CheapTweet was featured in an article in the Austin Business Journal about how local Austin, TX businesses are using Twitter. It’s great to get some coverage like this from the local media. Unfortunately, the online version of the article requires a subscription to the ABJ. Here’s a quick excerpt:

In November, Appozite LLC CEO Hayes Davis launched CheapTweet as one of four products the company sells to e-commerce companies. CheapTweet is designed for 21st century bargain hunters. The program scans Twitter for the best deals, coupons and sales that people are messaging about and then posts them on its home page.

Deals that attract enough votes are listed in the Web site’s Cheapest Tweets section. For e-commerce companies, CheapTweet also tracks responses to tweets.

Like [LiveOak 360 CEO Andy] Meadows, Davis said Twitter’s chief benefit is its immediacy — real-time information. But it also broadens the exposure of any company that wants to do more than simply operate a Web site and invest in search engine optimization, he said.

“[Twitter] has this real-time power that’s really difficult to find anywhere else,” Davis said. “For breaking news, it’s hard to beat that.”

As a bonus, it also talks about how our favorite Austin coffee shop, Sodade, is using Twitter to grow its business.