5 Smart Twitter Tips to Find Shopping Deals

Guest article by Jessy Troy.
How to find shopping deals with Twitter? The Holiday season is coming, the wisest of us are already getting ready for it to avoid last year’s holiday rush. More and more people choose to escape mall queues by shopping online and thus are looking for ways to spot a timely Internet deal. Twitter has turned into an awesome tool to do almost anything: you can use it to track news, keep in touch with your friends, find a job and save some money.

This post is about shopping with Twitter to use the micro-blogging platform to develop a smart shopping strategy.

1. Use Twitter Search

Check what people / sources you trust have to say about the product / seller you are considering: Twitter search has a few nifty advanced operators – one of them allows to find all updates tweeted by someone:

[apple from:CNETnews] – allows to find all news and reviews of Apple products tweeted by Cnet.

2. Use Comparison Shopping

TinyMassive is a Twitter bot allowing you to compare product prices while on Twitter. Just tweet your product search to @tinymassive and the bot will get back to you with the search results generated by the site itself.

Thus, the Tweet will contain:
1. The Twitter user name who has requested the info;
2. The search results count;
3. The minimum price found;
4. The link to the search results.

3. Follow Your Favorite Money-Saving Site

If you are an experienced shopper, you should be keeping an eye on a couple of coupon aggregators and deals directories. You might be monitoring them via email or RSS. But you’ll be happy to learn, there are more ways to track them.

Some of these sites have an associated Twitter accounts where they post coupon updates from the site. Here’s a quick example of how this can be useful:

• My favorite coupon aggregator, Cheap Stingy Bargains tweets coupons here, so I follow it;
• I use Seesmic Twitter desktop application which is awesome because it allows to sort your friends into groups. So I create a separate group for “Money saving tweets” and categorize it there. So each time there’s an update, Seesmic will update me.

4. Use Twitter-Based Tools

There are a couple of online tools searching Twitter and aggregating all the tweeted prices. Cheap Tweet is my personal favorite. It lists all tweeted prices in a Digg-like interface allowing users to upvote deals by clicking “It’s cheap!”. It also enables the user to quickly share the deal on Twitter (Share link) as well see all the Tweeple who have Tweeted this deal (Details link):

5. Contact Customer Service

Plenty of sellers are on Twitter – what you need to do is to find them there, see what they Tweet and who they follow as well as try to get in contact with them via Twitter. Here’s the most comprehensive list of customer service agents on Twitter I was able to find.

Quick tip: try @search on Twitter to see what people are saying about the seller. Example: [@zappos]

The guest post is written by Jessy Troy, an Internet enthusiast striving to discover plenty of web hacks and creative DIY gadgets. You can also write a guest article and share your favorite tools and services.