Every day we hear about new businesses being built around Twitter. Corporations such as Dell are discovering that it is an ideal way to distribute marketing information about deals and and services such as TwtQpn makes it easy for businesses to create Twitter coupons. But who wants to follow Dell? Maybe for a week or two while you are in the market for a new computer, but then you have to remember to unfollow. And if you are really into finding deals, following every retailer you love is a sure way to turn your Twitter stream into a constant flow of spam.
As a result, services are popping up to help you search for deals and coupons on Twitter. CheapTweet has already launched, and one that is in private beta is called Coupon Tweet. (To check out the beta be one of the first 500 readers to enter this code: TCBETA500). Coupon Tweet was developed by a Chicago firm called 12 Interactive, which is also behind employee discount site PerkSpot.
It filters out all the coupon-related messages from Twitter, categorizes them, and and lets you search them on its site. The latest deals appear chronologically in a familiar Twitter stream. Tabs across the top allow you to browse through specific retail categories (apparel, cell phones, computers, tickets, travel). Deals can be voted up or down the page, or retweeted. (CheapTweet has similar functionality). The top three deals are featured items. Stores can register with Coupon Tweet to ensure that all of the deals they Twitter are captured.
Since the links go straight to the retailer’s page, Coupon Tweet can simply feature items from retailers with affiliate programs like Amazon to start generating revenue. And those slots could be sold to keyword bidders as well. Anyone can also follow @CouponTweet on Twitter to get a stream of the best deals of the day.
How much of the total Twittering that goes one every day is commercial and are there really that many deals being Twittered every day that we need two services to keep track of them all? It is a tiny niche. Coupon Tweet founder Christopher Hill estimates that 4 million to 5 million total messages get Tweeted every day, and out of that he finds only about 1,500 coupon-related Tweets. He scrubs that down to 500 coupon Tweets a day, which comes out to about 0.01 percent of all Tweets. But you know what they say about early bird getting the worm and all that.
Impressive, no more slickdeals.net for me. Rewarding the twitter community with deals will pay huge dividends from company through the word of mouth it creates. Thx for the beta code TC.
I think if they can work in the right dynamic affiliate links, they may actually have a business model here.
Of course the tricky part is to be able to do this on the fly, as it would be close to impossible to do manually.
From India
Anjali Sen
It seems that social networking has changed the way business growing up…
Thats a terrible domain. Sounds like twat q peein
We’ve recently just set up Twitterfeed for DealDivine.com so all the latest coupons and deals from our rss feeds will automatically get posted on Twitter @DealDivine.
I feel like Twitter is becoming my new my.yahoo portal page these days…
Coupon Tweet is really impressive – I saw them tease a little at the last Tech Cocktail and was absolutely blown away.
Shameless plug: http://www.twit...er.com/dealyzer
“But who wants to follow Dell? Maybe for a week or two while you are in the market for a new computer, but then you have to remember to unfollow.”
You point out a major problem with Twitter here. Someone looking for deals/coupons might follow for a while but then they would need to stop following. Managing this process would be impractical for multiple products and vendors as you suggest.
The service described above doesn’t really build on the Twitter service. It actually is created to overcome this problem with Twitter itself.
I like Twitter but feel it should be used for specific purposes. Aren’t there other web services and platforms that would handle this process better than Twitter. Is this a case of “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail?”
Congrats, Chris & the Coupon Tweet team – the site looks great!
This is great. Another great product from the guys at Perkspot.
this is just like slickdeals with a different interface. blah, so what?
Nice one Techcrunch – always good to see how enterprises are trying to monitise social networks such as Twitter.
Great timing for this article, I’m kicking off our first Twitted promotion this Friday at work and this made interesting reading.
Just goes to show my theory: anything worth looking at is worth spamming. Twitterspam is looming on the horizon like a tsunami.
Good. Now i can find all the coupouns at one place.
Have you tried @tweet4blood where you can tweet for blood requests.
Very impressive, opens up loads of potential.
Got to chat with CouponTweet’s Chris Hill earlier. See clip here if anyone’s interested: http://multisoc...edia.com/?p=260
Well, since this is special enough to make TechCrunch, I figured tjoos.com needed a twitter feed:
http://twitter.com/tjoos
Still need to add links to the tweets, but the codes are out there in twitterverse
How can you capture all the tweets everyday? Is that the special Firehose feed that is used for this? Can someone comment?
Thx
I wrote a blog entry on something very similar (using Twitter to find good deals for stuff you want–the page http://paradigmpop.com/node/13 will say more), so this was a cool surprise to come by.
We currently have this capability on tweetizen.com as well… along with coupons, you can make a group with tags like deals, specials, sales etc and tweets from all over will be streamlined and in one place.
You can test it for yourself here: http://www.tweetizen.com/beta/
Just added this bad boy to:
http://www.twee...ns-and-bargains
Good find TC
J
I have to say it is really nice for me “the coupon code lady” because they sites retweet coupons for me and also link back to my website Thanks for the freebies!
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well twitter can never replaces full fledged web sites for deals and coupons, i like http://www.pccounter.net and will stick to it always