Free Twitter Text Notifications

I thought I'll just pop by after a while to give a bit of a helpful tip combining 3 great things - Technology, Football and Freemium. Yes, two of my most favorite things plus everybody's desire. You know how most weekends you receive texts from your mobile service provider reminding you to subscribe to a service which alerts you via text messages about news and scores from your favorite team at very 'low' costs? What if you could have that for absolutely no cost at all with no bother from any service provider. Here you go.

What you need

• A mobile phone
• A twitter account
• Official twitter account of the football (or sports) team you support

Step 1
Create a twitter account if you do not already have one in this day and age. (It's much cooler than Facebook by the way)

Setting up your mobile phone to receive tweets.
At this moment you need to go into your settings via the wrench icon on the right side of the top bar of the page. Clicking it brings up a drop down list that includes 'Settings'. Once on the settings page, you want to click on the 'Mobile' link on the left side menu. From there you need to set the form up for 'Activate Twitter Text Messaging'. Just go ahead and select your country and input your mobile number as well selecting your network or carrier provider. At the moment, for Ghana, Airtel, +Tigo Ghana , MTN, Glo, Expresso and Vodafone are all supported.
On the next screen, you are instructed to text GO on your phone to 40404. Do so. In a little while, the screen should automatically change to show that the activation was successful. You can change or leave the additional options as you wish. I choose to leave them as they are.

Step 2

Once you have your twitter account set up and mobile phone ready for tweet notifications, go ahead to find and follow the official twitter account of your club. I'm only suggesting the official accounts. This is because I'm assuming you do not want to be unnecessarily disturbed by tweet alerts on your phone by the unofficial accounts which tend to tweet for the fun of it even if it does not remotely concern the team plus useless made-up rumors. To make things a bit easy, I'm putting up links to the official verified accounts of some of the big clubs you most probably are a fun of.

https://twitter.com/MUFCOFFICIAL
https://twitter.com/Arsenal
https://twitter.com/chelseafc
https://twitter.com/FCBarcelona
https://twitter.com/realmadrid
https://twitter.com/acmilan
https://twitter.com/FCBayern

If these links aren't helpful to you for some reason as your team not coming to the top of my head as a popular team, go ahead and use the search bar to find your beloved club and click the follow button to follow them.
Note: Verified official accounts are marked by a verification icon --->
While you are at that, you might want to follow me on https://twitter.com/felixsarp or https://twitter.com/techdroolgh

Step 3
Having successfully followed your team, you need to set them up for receiving their tweets as text messages on your mobile phone.
First you want to go to their profile if you aren't there already. This can be done by searching from the list of people you follow or as a shortcut, press 'g' and 'u' together on your keyboard if you are on a computer and start typing the name of the team. If found and on their profile page, identify the settings on the left of the following button. Click it to reveal the drop down menu and notice 'Turn on mobile notifications' in the list. You are left with simply clicking to tick it on and you are good to go.

Henceforth, all official tweets from your team will be received on your phone as text messages even if you are not connected to the internet without any charges. If you are reading this from a country where you are charged for receiving text, you might not be too happy with this. For my Ghanaian friends and readers though, I'm sure you'll be happy with this. Thanks for reading and I hope I've been helpful in a way.

TISU.COM.GH - Experience

Tisu.com.gh is one of the many sprung up Ghanaian online purchasing websites that has caught my interest these past few months. This is a website that features deals from other businesses ranging from telecommunication networks, ice cream shops, phone unlocking and restaurants. Having only purchased mobile phone credit over this service, this review if I should call it so, might not completely reflect the experience you might have while using it for a different purchase. For those of you familiar with the Akan language, you might already have a fairly good understanding about the service provided by tisu.com.gh. If not, 'tisu' (or its correct spelling 'teso') in the Akan language means 'to reduce'. Yes, you guessed right. Tisu.com.gh is an online purchasing service that features discounted deals from other businesses for the purchase of their products or services. As you may already know or be already, Ghanaians will always ask for a reduction of price for any item they purchase. This is why being Ghanaian, I was much content about getting to know about this service. May I acknowledge +David Baksmaty for introducing me to this great service.

How It Works

You should first be  a registered user to use the service. This requires the normal filling of a form with basic information and account verification.
Next, you find a deal from the website that interests you. The website usually has about three or four deals to choose from every week. These deals are very diverse with regards to business type and so you will most likely find something that interests you. If nothing interests you, at least you may be tempted by a mobile network deal which features every week as I have observed for yourself or a loved one.

Having found a deal, you make an order simply by clicking a 'buy' button. It is important to read the deal information to know its expiration date as well as how many orders needed for it to tip. From my experience, all the deals I have bought have only had one user order requirement to tip/activate.

Wait for the order confirmation email, read it and proceed to make the payment as you wish via one of the acceptable mode of payments - MTN mobile money, MPower mobile payments, GT Bank and Stanbic Bank deposites.

Upon payment completion, another mail is sent which confirms if the order limit for the deal has tipped and a link to print your coupon is provided. For my case, I was just emailed the particular telecommunication network scratch card numbers since I didn't need to enjoy or receive the product/service at the merchant's place and so the coupon was available but not needed. I believe these coupons will be needed for deals where you would have to go to the merchant such as a discounted dinner at a restaurant, ice cream purchase or the decode/unlock blackberry deal I have just seen.

My 1st Experience

The great thing about tisu.com.gh is the fact that payments for deals are made online (sort of). In my case, for discounted tigo credit deal, I wished to pay through my Tigo cash account. Who wouldn't want to just sit in front of their computer or any internet browsing capable device and purchase cell phone credit  for as low as 1GHS for 5GHS worth credit. Tigo cash is not in the list of acceptable payment modes and after talking with tisu.com.gh customer care it was 'clear' I cannot pay through Tigo cash - a message I consciously ignored. I went ahead to attempt getting the deal and received details of the order and payment instructions in an email.

Message received from tisu.com.gh confirming order and payment instructions

 I then went ahead to precisely ignore the info on the site and the nice customer service lady and made a transfer of the 1 cedi into Tisu's MTN Mobile Money account from my Tigo Cash account. Knowing very well I had not followed instructions to the letter of the 'law', I replied Tisu's email stating that I had made the purchase with Tigo Cash and gave them the code for retrieving the money quoting the order number for the purchase. Within an hour, I was emailed the scratch card number of the Tigo credit which I loaded immediately to have my 5 cedis credit. Since then, I have gone on to buy mobile phone credit for two other mobile networks - MTN and Airtel.

Apart from the main service of simply buying a deal and enjoying it, tisu.com.gh also has some interesting added features. Some of which include buying a deal for a friend and the use of gift cards. You can check them out from the site and let us and them know what you think about them.