LinkShare Blog

Unless you’ve been living underground, you probably know the phenomena that is Twitter so we won’t go into much detail.  Twitter describes itself on it’s home page as a place to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”  Plus, people do so in 140 characters or less.

Imagine an online Twitter mini-mall, where consumers can find the best deals, cool products and Publishers can even make money. With more than 50 million live Twitter accounts, the online community represents a consumer base eager for information from people they trust – what to buy, where to buy it, how to find the best deals, etc.  Just today eMarketer came out with a report on how social shopping is becoming  more important to retailers.

We’re excited to announce a new Bento Box feature called the #tweetshop tool. It enables Publishers to find products to recommend from their Advertisers, and send them to their Twitter followers – all from a single interface.

Using the #tweetshop tool is easy -

1. Input your LinkShare token (what’s this?)
2. Enter your Twitter user name and password
3. Search for products. You can search within a single Advertisers or across all your partners.
4. Choose a product and shorten the link
5. Customize the tweet and send it!

Additionally, Twitter users can filter posts that contain the #tweetshop hash tag to see products that people have recommended.   We hope that the community embraces this hash tag and works together to build a virtual Twitter mini-mall!

If you’re not on Twitter, it could be a great way to reach customers. Here are a few Publishers who are active on Twitter today:

• http://twitter.com/shopathomewild
• http://twitter.com/stylefeeder
• http://twitter.com/TheFind
• http://twitter.com/savingsdotcom

You can find the #TweetShop tool here.

While we’re on the topic of Twitter, here are a few tips on how to optimize your tweets for search engine visibility (SEO).

Top Five SEO Tips for Twitter

Optimize front of your tweet with keywords

• The first few characters (48-62) are likely to show up in the title tag

Add a retweet (RT) to the end of the tweet

• The front part of your tweet is precious landscape so don’t waste the landscape up front

Include keywords in hashtags

• Optimize, optimize, optimize. If you’re on Twitter talking about a topic use the appropriate hashtag
• Hash tags provide unity to conversations and people can go to search.twitter.com and enter the hashtag to see who else in talking about that topic

Communicate immediately with someone on Twitter

• You’re tweet might have a higher chance of being noticed if you go out and engage to someone immediately
• If you communicate with them regularly, go ahead and ask within a DM (direct message) if they would be so kind to RT
• Don’t abuse your people on Twitter, so be selective when doing A and B

Include keywords in URL shorteners

• Using URL shorteners, there are some out there that let you customize them
• Use keywords you wish to target in your URL

Here is a quick demo video to show you how #tweetshop works:

Ian Rosenwach, Product Manager