I’m a big fan of movies and possibly an even bigger fan of bargains, so my ultimate bargain is free movie tickets. In the UK, there are a couple of ways to get free movie tickets, but the main way is to sign up to a mailing list from SeeFilmFirst.com. Unfortunately, there are so many people subscribed to that list, that you rarely get offered free tickets. However, some of the lucky people that do, will often post the details for claiming tickets on another website, HotUKDeals.com.

 

HotUKDeals.com allows you to setup custom RSS feeds for specific deals. So in my case, I have a feed setup just for movie tickets. However, because I don’t monitor my RSS feeds in real-time (like I do with twitter), I’ll often miss out on tickets because I was just too late. Not wanting to miss out on my favourite freebies, I wondered if I could put technology to work for me.

 

Using the website TwitterFeed.com, I linked my free movie ticket RSS feed to a twitter account @freescreenings. TwitterFeed polls my RSS feed every 30 minutes and sends out tweets about any new ticket offers to the @freescreenings account. I then follow that account, to ensure I get to know about the free tickets asap. At most I can be 30 minutes behind the deal submission, but that is usually more than enough to score tickets, as was proven today when I was fortunate to grab two tickets to the new Star Trek movie.

 

And that’s how I made Twitter, RSS and a few websites work for me.