News: Today Starbucks launched a new way to give a friend a Starbucks gift card. It is called “Tweet a Coffee.” You link your Twitter profile to your Starbucks profile, and then can send tweets of $5 Starbucks gift cards. You can use any major credit card as a form of payment, but the first 100,000 to pay for their Tweet A Coffee with Visa will receive a five dollar Starbucks gift card back to them. (One time $5 gift back). The official blog post on this new Twitter Starbucks card gifting is here. Since I’m still pretty addicted to Twitter (I am @SbuxMel) I think this could be fun. My only worry is that some people don’t check their Twitter feed all that often, so I suppose it’s possible that a gift could be missed. If you have a Twitter profile, start using it. 😉 Also, this is available in the U.S. only.
Have you tried “Tweet a Coffee” yet?
On a change of topic, I thought I’d entice everyone about the Starbucks holiday season, which is right around the corner. (You might want to use all those Tweet a Coffee gifts on the holiday beverages, which start November 1, 2013). A reader sent me this image of a Starbucks 2013 holiday gift card. Very cute little gift card tag! Enjoy!
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Not too sure the Twitter tweet a coffee will be hugely successful but that gift card is super cute and I want one!
I too have mixed feelings about this gift card program. It sort of seems too complicated where people might not use it and I agree Melody if you are not a frequent user of Twitter than you might not see the gift. Is SB trying to get more visible on Twitter?
Melody: Holiday drinks/soft launch is November 1.
I want to try this out! Who should I TweetACoffee to? 🙂
Fun! I just tweeted a coffee to my husband. He’s going to love it 🙂
An important note, this is a BETA program so be prepared (i.e., careful)
The VISA connection is obviously a promotion too to get you to preferably use a VISA card, but whatever card is connected to your Starbucks account is what will be charged.
Excerpted from the Tweet A Coffee site: Be one of the first 100,000 customers to tweet-a-coffee now through 11/6 using a Visa® card and you’ll get a $5 Starbucks Card eGift. then the fine print.
While I follow social media (mainly to keep up on the technology side), I do not live on it like some folks. So sad that we are becoming so personally unconnected. Face to face today means FaceTime or Skype, not my idea of fun.
WOW what a hassle!!
BTW if your account or the account you are sending to is protected, then you are SOL.
I only did it to get the free $5 gc, and after 15 minutes and logging in and out and deleting cookies… I really hope I did it. I worked hard for the gc lol!!
Oh no it;s been like 30 minutes now and it isn’t work! I ma getting a server error when I try to finalize it (clicking the link in the tweet) I unprotected my account for this.
Does anyone know if the send a tweet account is replying to tweets?
@LB – Oh no. I didn’t think about the problem of protected Twitter accounts. I never saw a server error. There is a @TweetACoffee profile, but it looks like it sends out totally automated tweets. For example, if you put too many “@” names in a tweet with @TweetACoffee, it will tell you that you can only give to one person at a time. If those are not automated tweets, they sure look like it. I hope you get it to work.
The first time I used it, I had to update my Visa info – it pulls from your Starbucks.com profile. And my Visa info was old & expired, as I normally use Paypal for Starbucks.com egift cards. I couldn’t find anyway to update my address from the “Tweet A Gift” steps – for some reason it pulled an old Seattle address for me, but I just left it, and it still worked fine. After the first one, the whole thing got much, much faster.
I hope you get this figured out!
That was fun. /sarcasm
Lesson learned here. This morning I had a minute at my desk, and decided that I would give a bunch of friendly, regular twitter users gift cards. Once you’ve got it all set up, it moves very fast on your phone.
I started sending a bunch, then got weird error tweets back.
Turns out, my bank – having never before seen this rapid fire progression of $5 charges – put a “fraud hold” on my Visa debit card. Lesson learned. Go slowly. I spent a while on the phone (a lovely time on hold with my bank) and I think I’ve got it worked out. Won’t do that again.
Worked flawless for me with my discover card. fun idea.
interesting issue with the protected account, but note i got an email as well as a tweet that i received a gift card
Tweet worked fine for me. IF you used a VISA cc you get a $5 e-gift too (for first 100,000) I bet that will be used up way soon. Most twitter folks can/should get e-mail that they were tweeted to. I also got notice that my tweet was read by recipient! Nice way to make someone’s day!
Thanks Mel for mine! Always fun to see what surprises they have in store for us! 🙂
First: like the gift card, very cute.
Secondly,agree with @DadC….. plus I don’t tweet or want to. FB is more than enough for me….
Hmm, no e-mail came through for me, probably because I cannot confirm the purchase. They tweeted me back once, and customer service had no idea what I was talking about. I am way beyond frustrated with this. I really hope that I get the extra $5 one.
Melody, Thought I would tweet you a coffee yesterday and thought to myself, “hmmm nothing happened!” Upon further investigation discovered I cannot do this because my account is protected. I know it’s protected and cannot figure out how to “unprotect it”. But then again I thought yeah leave it be because it wanted to link to my starbucks acct and I feel that makes my finances too vulnerable in the tech world. But it is a neat idea. And YOU KNOW I’m living for Friday!!! hahaha
It’s a bit complicated at first, maybe not the second time. I really would like the option to use my paypal or pull money directly from my SBUX card. Not to keen on having to give up my cc info :-/
Melody, I only sent one gift via TweetACoffee and my credit card company flagged the transaction as potentially fraudulent and bounced the transaction — apparently some credit card companies do NOT like low-denomination purchases of gift cards via credit card (looks like something fishy to them). So, even trying to send one didn’t work for me. 🙁
Thanks for the GC Mel! I think it’s a pretty nifty way to connect with others on Twitter. Can’t wait to see what else comes up!
I have been thinking about all the comments to this post and I guess I cannot totally understand why SB did this promotion with all the issues related to it. I would love to see at the end the stats from it. How many people actually bought gift cards?
Well, I think that Starbucks offers eGifting through a variety of platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Starbucks.com) to sort of meet people where they are. I do think that the Twitter “Tweet a Coffee” will work really well for those who are truly active Twitter users, check their tweet stream, and like Starbucks. And given how huge both Twitter and Starbucks are, that could be millions of people. Twitter, while much smaller than Facebook, does really have hundred of millions of users.
As an avid Twitter user, I think the new tweet-a-coffee eGifting feature is great! The thing about Twitter is, as with most social media sites, it is what you make of it. And although I certainly do not personally know all the folks I follow (and vice versa), there are many I’ve come to admire and appreciate. Sometimes when scrolling through my timeline, I see someone I’ve engaged with has had a rough day or achieved something they’ve been working towards or maybe they’ve even shared information that has been helpful to me and I want to say/show thanks. So, whether it’s to fulfill those scenarios or to simply say, “Hey, I think you’re awesome; have a coffee on me,” Starbucks created a platform to do just that. Even though I have a protected account, I gladly unprotect it to tweet-a-coffee. 🙂
You know…I heard about this right when it came out, did a test tweet {albeit to myself} to make sure it would work, and they never contacted me to conclude or gift it.
My only worry is that I’d gift it to someone that decides they’ll suddenly take a break from twitter. LOL