Amex Offers Automation Broken
Over the past year I have written a few posts about setting up your American Express accounts to automatically sync with the latest Amex Offers via Twitter. For me this automation is important since many of the best offers reach their limit rather quickly. I once slept during a Staples Amex Offer and regretted it for months! 🙂
- Related: How I Automated My Twitter Accounts to Sync With Amex Offers
- Related: Performing an Amex Offers Audit: Are You Ready for the Next Storm of Deals?
How the Automation Works
The automation system works fairly simply. You setup a “master” account and then you have all of your regular Twitter accounts linked to cards. Each of the regular Twitter accounts tweets out what the master account tweets. The master account can either manually tweet or it can be set to tweet out something from another account. In my case I used @Offersbot.
Basically @Offersbot tweets whenever there is a new offer, my master account picks it up and tweets it and then all of my regular accounts tweet it as well. The system has worked fairly well. Until now. Unfortunately over the past couple of weeks I have noticed there is no automation. My automated system is not working. Why?
Well I contacted the person who runs the @Offersbot account and asked if anyone else was having a problem. The answer is yes. Apparently Twitter has removed @Offersbot from search results. The automation relies on a search for @Offersbot tweets with a specific hashtag. Here is how that search now turns up.
This explains it. The master account is searching for these tweets and Twitter says they don’t exist. Ouch!
Note: Free-quent Flyer has an alternate method of automation using an RSS feed, but it too relies on @Offersbot.
How to Stay Up to Date
As of now, I’m not aware of other Twitter accounts that are parsing the latest offers and tweeting them out. (If you know of one then please leave it in the comments!) As a partial solution, I have turned on mobile notifications for @Offersbot. At least that way I will receive the tweets as a text message and can then go into my master account and tweet the offer’s hashtag. It isn’t automated, but I am more likely to see new offers sooner.
I have been advised that the developer of @Offersbot is working on a solution that will be implemented soon which should bypass this latest issue. As soon as it is in place and working I’ll make sure to update everyone on how to get your automation back up and running.
Locked Accounts
As a footnote, I also want to mention that Twitter has been locking a lot of accounts lately. They do this if they suspect it is a spam or automated account. It is always wise to make sure all of your accounts are unlocked and tweeting out offers. Sometimes your accounts can be locked and you won’t even receive a notice. This happened to a handful of my accounts a few weeks ago.
Conclusion
If your Amex Offers automation is broken, it is most likely because of Twitter and not your system. Thankfully there is a way to sort of stay up to date and hopefully this will get fixed soon or perhaps another account will step up to provide the service. Either way, it appears we have to do it ourselves for now.
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[…] today I wrote a post about why Amex Offers automation has stopped working for the most part on Twitter. In addition to those automation problems, others have surfaced today […]
I too have come to find out a few of my Twitter Accts have been locked. Might you be able to share how to unlock them? Please
I was able to unlock mine one by one by logging in on the website and verifying with a phone number. Once the account was verified, I could remove the phone number and add it to the next locked account.
I wondered what happened. Man I hope they fix this.
DoC thinks there’s a bigger issue at hand for Amex Offers via Twitter:
http://www.doctorofcredit.com/the-axe-is-falling-on-duplicating-amex-offers/
I registered under mulitple tabs and tried to register via twitter for my serve cards and it told me that I had already enrolled. If what he’s saying is true, it would be a detriment to automate Amex Offers.
I did see that post and there is a lot that is still unknown at this point. The multiple accounts issue is a separate one, although I agree automating for the time being isn’t the best thing to do until we figure out what the new “linking” policy is.
A couple of weeks ago I had an issue on the Dunkin Donuts offer where a bunch of my Twitter accounts came back and said the offer had already been connected. Those same accounts linked the Jet offer this morning fine.
Maybe offersbot shut down. Starting about 5 days ago, this page shut down, https://offersbot.io/offers
This link always showed the most current offers, expired offers, etc.
I would check this link daily for over a year and always got the most up to date offers.
I would then use Tweetdeck to link the cards. Did not use the Offersbot service.
For the last week I’ve just been checking all the blogs, including this one for new offer posts.
Amex on Twitter is always way behind ironically, not a good resource for their own offers.
We took down our site pending a rework of that page. We hope to complete out the new website and some additional tools this weekend
I noticed this a few weeks ago. A message briefly appeared about my account being in violation but then disappeared. Tweetdeck only showed the first account, the others appeared to be loading. A few days later the master account was locked.
Good post and I’m looking forward to any updates on this.
Also, are Twitter accounts being frozen because of the automation or it’s is a bigger picture issue? I use tweetdeck and to find out some of my accounts might be frozen without even knowing is definitely a bit concerning.
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I think it could be a bigger system change. I add offers manually on Twitter and am not getting a response after the first tweet. I’m using the ways I always have, i.e. #AmexJet 2, #AmexJet great deal. Getting no response at all on some of these.