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American Express Program Offers Discounts for Tweets

via Mashable by Todd Wasserman on 3/7/12

American Express, which has already launched programs with Facebook and Foursquare, is tackling another social media channel with a new initiative awarding discounts for tweets.

The program works like this: Cardholders go to sync.americanexpress.com/twitter to sync their card with their Twitter account. Then, when they tweet various "special offer" hashtags (like "#amexcoffee" for instance), couponless savings are loaded onto their cards.

If you follow those directions, the next time you go to buy one of the featured items at a participating merchant, the savings wil be automatically delivered via a statement credit in a few days. Best Buy, McDonald's, Whole Foods Market and Zappos are among the participating merchants. (See the video below for a further explanation.)

The idea seems like a fair trade-off: You get discounts in exchange for marketing on behalf of American Express and its merchant partners on Twitter. Some of the deals include: A $20 statement credit when you tweet "#AmexWholeFoods" and use your synced card to make a purchase of $75 or more at Whole Foods and a $10 statement credit when you spend $100 or more at Best Buy and tweet "#AmexBestBuy."

Twitter is a relatively new arena for AmEx. However, the company has been aggressive on other social media fronts. Last July, the brand launched a program called "Link, Like, Love" that tailored deals to you based on your Facebook "likes." (For instance, if you "liked" Whole Foods, you might see an offer on your Facebook dashboard.) The brand also linked with Foursquare last June for a national program that rewarded users with a loyalty card-like credit when they checked in.

The new program also comes after AmEx worked with Twitter for an initiative offering $100 in free advertising for the first 10,000 businesses to sign up for Twitter's new self-serve ad platform. That offer is going live this month.