Hashtag promotional Twitter campaigns. Spam? Or a new and acceptable form of viral marketing?
It's June 30th 2009, and Moonfruit is celebrating it's 10th anniversary. A startup reborn. In the last 10 years they've raised money, grown to 65 staff, shrunk back down to the 2 founding partners, and now it looks as though their product, a web site building business might have found it's time.
My interest lies in how they shot back from virtual anonymity to the forefront of the media's attention. How did they put their business back on the map?. Hashtags. Specifically this one - #moonfruit. Which was the top trending term on Twitter during the campaign. For 10 days they promised to give away 1 Macbook Pro for every year they've been in business. All people needed to do was to add the #moonfruit hashtag to their tweet and the winner of that days Macbook would be chosen at random. Moonfruit later added an 11th MacBook for the best designed site using their service, very smart way to increase engagement.
Was the Twitter drive a success? Well lets take a look at the stats:
- 444, the number of followers before the campaign
- 44,256, the number of followers at the end of the campaign
- 30,000 the number of followers retained after it all died down
- Accounted for 2.5% of all twitter traffic on day 2
- Traffic to moonfruit.com increased 1,300%
- Sign ups for their service - up 100%
- 4, the number of google pages they jumped for their natural search ranking terms. A result of buzz, trending and the associated press coverage this campaign garnered.
No one can argue that it's delivered them amazing results. That they were one of the first to innovate with a hashtag campaign. They ran a completely transparent, honest and highly viral campaign. Congratulations must be paid to them for this. However, as with any new space there's always a period of pushing boundaries and finding the balance between what the community will stand for and what they deem to be unacceptable spam.
A new kind of spam. Well not quite, viral spam has been around forever; text messages, emails, and hand written letters before that. This user generated spam (UGS), to some is an annoyance - here and here. To others an opportunity to join the party and get themselves a free MacBook. As with anything that appears easy to participate in, do we take the time to identify the opportunity before jumping in? It seems not:
#moonfruit was being tweeted around 200,000 times per day
1 in 200,000 the odds of you winning that MacBook.
Did anybody stop and think if a 1 in 200,000 chance of winning was worth polluting your stream with spam? Risk loosing "twitter friends" over? No of course not. It was quick, simple and harmless - and I want one of those MacBooks!
So what was it? Spam or an innovative new approach to viral marketing. I'd say both, but what an excellent campaign and all credit to the team at Moonfruit for recognising the path beaten by Squarespace, learning from it, and delivering a brilliant marketing campaign.