Anyone looking to service the independent or on-trade sectors is today encouraged to join the growing the number of suppliers that are using Harpers Wine & Spirit's #winedealfriday to offer special deals directly through Twitter, the social media service.The new promotional tool is now into its third week and is available to anyone looking to offer specific deals to independent wine merchants or the restaurant and bar sectors.

You can either put up an existing offer or ideally create a unique promotion that you can market under #winedealfriday.

Simply go to your twitter account and set out what your promotion is ensuring you include the #winedealfriday hashtag. You might want to also direct potential interested customers to your own site for more information or to a key contact to follow up.

Any interested independent wine merchants or restaurants can then search under the #winedealfriday hashtag for any offers that particularly appeal to them. You can also use twitter search sites like Twitterment and put in the term, #winedealfriday, to see what offers have been put up.

If you are an independent or member of the on-trade and see an offer that you think would be particularly relevant to others in the trade then please retweet the offer to your followers.

The #winedealfriday initiative is being seen by many suppliers as not only a good way of keeping in contact with existing customers, but an ideal way of finding new business in what are notoriously diverse sectors of the market.

Once you have put up your #winedealfriday offer you can also retweet it to the harperswine and richardsiddle twitter accounts for wider distribution.