Merchant Cir. Goes Live with Coupons on Twitter

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.

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