They’re not the first but this may prove to be a significant move for MerchantCircle: distributing local merchant coupons via Twitter. The company has now set up city-specific Twitter feeds that distribute merchant coupons. If you also search for #coupons on Twitter, you’ll find many of their new “domains”:
On one of the individual sites it looks like this: a feed of all the deals from the various local merchants.
If you click on any of the individual coupons you’re taken to the MC merchant site:
The appeal to both local businesses and consumers is obvious and it adds to the “SEO” value that MC is providing those actively using its site.
This new coupon/discounts syndication is in keeping with MC’s more recent push into consumer services; on the MC site you can following local businesses and get their deals that way as well. It also complements the deeper engagement that the MC consumer tools imply. If I as a local consumer want simply to be apprised of new coupons created by local businesses in my area I can just follow the Twitter feed.
(Valpak also has a Twitter feed but not by location like this. Discounts and deals have already proven to be a significant use case for Twitter. And there’s a potentially big local angle here too: aggregation of multiple vendors’ deals/coupons by city or zip — a RetailMeNot by location for Twitter, if you will)
Given the SEO traffic that MC gets and the new Twitter distribution it’s probably something that third party SEO/SEM firms should consider for their clients’ campaigns, although I don’t know how labor intensive that would be.
June 30, 2009 at 3:58 pm
why not just rip a page out of penny savers, fold it up into a paper airplaine and toss it right at a pedestrian’s head. it would be as targeted.
June 30, 2009 at 3:59 pm
*airplane
July 8, 2009 at 11:01 pm
Paulino – Do you have a web-solution for deploying the paper airplanes? You may be on to something!
July 9, 2009 at 4:25 pm
[…] are using Twitter as a distribution vehicle or traffic driver, including MerchantCircle (for coupons and deals), Scoot in the UK and a range of others. Soon it will be mandatory to have some “Twitter […]
July 12, 2009 at 10:40 am
Good idea Paulino!
While you’re at it, you can head out to http://paperairplaneshq.com to learn how to fold paper airplanes. There’s 50 of them there.