You may have heard of Twitter before, but before you use it to your own advantage it can be difficult to imagine just how useful a tool it can be. Right at this moment there are millions of people all over the planet tweeting not only their personal thoughts, but also the best website links, photos and videos they’ve found, not to mention the most sought after deals.

If you’re not a part of twitter then you’ll be missing all of those deals, voucher codes and limited-time promotions. We’re glad to tell you that there are several twitter-tools you can install that will sort the latest deals from your other tweets automatically. We’re going to take a look at the tools we think you’ll find the most useful, and explain how they work so that you can choose the best ones for your situation…

Deal-Specific Twitter Accounts

Some people, companies and websites have taken the work out for you and set up a twitter account especially to announce online deals and bargains. The trick is to find your favorite that may be enough (without tools and applications clogging up your desktop. Here are the two I use:

1. @couponsherpa by Coupon Sherpa: user-picked deals and coupons;
2. @Amazon by Amazon: Official deals from Amazon.

You’ll also find a great list of ‘deal-tweeters’ at The Simple Dollar blog, and this blog post from Dir Journal lists some great company twitter accounts that often tweet about their deals and promotions.

Search Twitter by Emotions

It’s all very well searching twitter for new deals, but it’s always a disappointment when you find some and they’re all giving negative press. Who wants to hear about that? Luckily for users Twitter has implemented a ‘sentiment search’ into their search page. This means that you can add an emoticon to your search term and the relevant sentiment will be searched for.
E.g.

Community Sites and Twitter Tools

There are various communities and websites online dedicated to finding tweets about the latest coupons and deals. After all, deals pop up all over the place without warning, and twitter is a great place for online stores to advertise them. Scroll down for our favorites…

CouponTweet
Vote your favorite coupon code tweets up or down to help this site aggregate the best ones. Each user is asked to specify why they’ve voted down too, so you can see exactly what’s ‘wrong’ with the link.

CheapTweet
Find the most relevant and best quality deals via their number of ‘cheaps’. You can vote tweets up or down by giving a thumbs up/down too. This site also has its own verification system and tagging.

Fun Money-Saving Twitter Bots:

Most people associate twitter bots with being incredibly annoying, but actually they can provide a great service if you follow the right one. They essentially take the work out of searching for relevant tweets, and will retweet any tweet they find with their keyword/keyphrase in. Here are some that we found useful…

Buy It Later (twitter.com/buylater)
You can follow this bot on twitter, and download the Buy It Later bot firefox addon that gives realtime alerts as well. It tells you when certain Amazon prices change, when items come on sale and when items become unavailable.

TinyMassive (twitter.com/tinymassive)
Tweet the item you want to compare prices for to @tinymassive and they will send you back price comparison search results, based on the database they have on their site.

ASKch (twitter.com/askch)
Another useful Call-and-Response bot, which sends you price comparisons on prescription and non-prescription medications available online.

Share Your Twitter-Secrets

Do you know of any other great ways to track deals on twitter that we haven’t mentioned? Should the rest of the world know how you find your vouchers and coupon codes? Please share your tips and links in our comments section below!

The guest post is by Ann who loves searching for promo codes and online deals!