Most e-tailers know that Twitter is a powerful social tool, but not all online merchants and retailers know how to use Twitter to market products, promote sales and boost revenue.

Obviously you need to have your own Twitter account—and many merchants do, but how do you expand your Twitter presence beyond your own community of followers? For Web shop owners, online retailers and individual sellers, CheapTweet might be the answer.

CheapTweet, the flagship product of Appozite, a company that brings e-commerce and social software together, is an online search engine for Twitter deals. 

This social search engine searches all tweets to find conversations about online deals, promotions and coupons. It then pulls those deal-focused tweets to CheapTweet.com, where the deals are sorted into categories and a community of users vote for the deals they like best. The more votes a deal gets, the higher up the tweet moves on the CheapTweet homepage.

CheapTweet.com displays deal-related tweets on its site allowing people to vote for their favorite deals. (Click for larger image).

Hayes Davis, Founder and CEO of Appozite, said that CheapTweet basically harnesses the power of social conversations to sort through deal tweets and find the best ones.  It provides an easy way for small brands to get more exposure by getting their deal messages out to people who are already in shopping mode.

How It Works for Retailers and Online Sellers

While CheapTweet offers deals from all retailers—big and small­—the service can be especially useful to smaller retailers and individual online sellers, who have a small Twitter following. 

For example, an Etsy artisan with a Twitter following of a hundred people can tweet his or her online deals and sales to those people. But if your deal gets picked up by CheapTweet, it will be retweeted and also sent to CheapTweet.com, where it can be seen by a much larger audience.  

On Twitter your message has a short lifespan. After your message is published, it usually doesn’t take long for that tweet to scroll off a follower’s screen as new tweets get published.  On CheapTweet.com the deal message will stay live for a longer period of time.

Another benefit, according to Davis is that your deal can also be picked up by Google via CheapTweet.com. He explained, “Tweets are not indexed by Google very well, but on CheapTweet.com we actually build a page around each individual tweet and these pages are good for Google SEO."  

To have your deals included on CheapTweet, retailers and sellers simply need to talk about their deals and sales on Twitter and include a link to the deal or product page. The CheapTweet engine will automatically find your deal-related tweet and add it to CheapTweet.com.

There are other advertising options available through CheapTweet.com, such as a top-sponsored deal tweet, or you can invest in a CheapTweet Store—your own branded portal on the CheapTweet site. The store option is used more by larger online retailers, like VacationRentals.com and Overstock.com, that have multiple on-going deals.

CheapTweet also runs sidebar advertisements for retailers that can link to the promotion on your Web site, your CheapTweet Store or your brand on twitter. The cost of upgrading your CheapTweet presence varies, but the advertising options are based on CPM.

Twitter Tips for Better Brand Exposure

CheapTweet automatically finds your tweets and adds them to CheapTweet.com. If you want to ensure that CheapTweet finds your deals you can use the #cheaptweet hashtag, although it is not required—it can help.

Twitter, uses hashtags to organize Tweets into general topics to make it easy to follow discussions on a specific topic. So, when you tweet a new deal you might want to add #cheaptweet in your Twitter deal update to help CheapTweet and bargain hunters find your message.

 Davis said that smaller retailers should encourage their Twitter followers to vote for their deals on CheapTweet.com. You can register for a free account on the site to vote on and categorize your deals, which often results in more people seeing the promotion. 

As with hashtag usage, when it comes to voting for favorite deals, Davis said that CheapTweet has the tools in place to prevent people from gaining or spamming the system. Just because you use a hashtag or vote on the site, it does not guarantee a better placement.

Davis believes that anyone with merchandise and products to sell should have a Twitter presence. While services like CheapTweet can help smaller brands get more exposure, he likes to remind people that they really have to be an authentic human voice behind the brand when using social tools like Twitter.

He recommends that retailers use Twitter, not only to promote deals, but to provide customer service to your Twitter followers by answering questions and communicating with them on Twitter.

Vangie Beal is a veteran online seller and frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com. She is also managing editor of Webopedia.com. You can tweet with her online @AuroraGG.