The Twitterverse has been abuzz this past week with Moonfruit taking centre stage. The self-service online website generator ran a week-long raffle offering one Macbook Pro a day to anyone in the world who including the hashtag #moonfruit in their tweets. The unconstrained campaign allowed Tweeps to enter multiple times and also required separate entries for each of the daily draws.
Social-Bug have released a case study that examines the recent #moonfruit hashtag Twitter viral campaign and it’s implications for the future of marketing on Twitter.
Twitter offers a frictionless medium in which a viral campaign like #moonfruit is able to propagate. To Moonfruit's credit, they were able to increase the rate of sign-ups for their product trial by 350% and also increase website traffic by 600%. (According to Moonfruitlounge.com)
Key Metrics:
- Twitter followers increased from 444 to 44,113 over 7 days.
- Traffic to Moonfruit.com increased 600%
- Trials on Moonfruit.com increased by 350%
- #moonfruit was the number one topic on Twitter for two days
surpassing Michael Jackson giving them a featured position on every Twitter user’s homepage.
Depending on what perspective you take, the unprecedented success of the campaign driven by the Twitter community has led to Moonfruit becoming a poster child for:
A: How to run a marketing campaign on Twitter or B: Spam on Twitter
While there have been many complaints, the vast majority clearly did not take issue and continued to repeatedly tweet #moonfruit in the hopes of winning one of the 10 Macbook Pros on offer. We are sure to see more Twitter hashtag campaigns in the future but with 2 major changes:
- Campaign managers will learn how to minimize and mitigate backlash against their brands.
- Prizes will get bigger. Everyone has their price.
Key Observations:
- Interest in Moonfruit spread beyond Twitter with searches on Google for “moonfruit” peaking on day 3 (July 2,2009) of the campaign and “what is moonfruit?” categorised as a breakout search term which correlated with the release of a favourable article posted on the popular social media news website, Mashable.
- Following @moontweet was not a requirement to enter the competition, it was merely suggested as one way to find out if you had won, and yet they have ended up with 100X more followers than they started with.
- Campaign shortened from 10 days to 7 days in an attempt to diffuse negative sentiment with regard to Twitter feed ‘pollution.’
- #moonfruit hashtag was hijacked by spammers in order to garner attention towards wares like 'get rich quick' schemes, but was also used by some charitable causes.
The report concludes with a discussion on the responsibility of Twitter vs. the community to police the Twitterverse and proposes an optimised Twitter campaign strategy. The complete Moonfruit Twitter Marketing Campaign Report is available at Social-Bug.com