Moonfruit Kicking a*** on Twitter...

[Women Unlimited]

I don't know if any of you have been following what's been happening on Twitter this week, but Moonfruit - an online website creation company have been using Twitter to celebrate their 10 year anniversary. They are offering 10 free Macbooks over 10 days to anyone who puts the #moonfruit tag in their tweets. This promotion has netted them over 30,000 followers in 3 days - absolutely AMAZING!

I am sure there will be people who do a similar deal in the coming months but I suspect they won't be nearly as successful. What's great for them is that while they would have hoped for the great Twitter following - I suspect there is no way they would have expected all the amazing PR that they have got as well, with lots of Kudos from social media guru's all over the world.

What can we learn from this?

BE BIG - BE BOLD - BE FIRST!

If anyone would like a chance to speak first hand with Wendy Tan White, the founder of Moonfruit about Twitter, or how she has managed to turn her business around and achieve growth during a recession, you can meet her at our next Women Unlimited meetup on July 29th.

 

[Master Kaday]

They were not actually first to run this kind of promotion.

 

[Women Unlimited]

No, but they have done it REALLY well ... Lenovo (IBM) did it by offering £200 off their laptops, and Squarespace are currently running an iphone one, but Moonfruit's campaign is set to beat all of them. They've been very clever and are really keeping their Twitter audience engaged, who are also having great fun with the promo.

I can almost guarantee that they will become the case study of how to do promotion through Twitter.

 

[Gillie]

I have been watching this on twitter and there is some wonderful humour starting to come out now, such as those posting up pics with ransom notes and so forth, but yes it does to have rather caught on - mind mention a celeb or do an offer this last week and it will go crazy - seems the twitter community is up for anything at the moment.

 

[Women Unlimited]

They certainly are! I thought the ransom note was hilarious!

 

[garysumpter]

Interesting idea, but did they get much extra business out of it?

 

[Women Unlimited]

Too soon to tell, but if you factor in the PR element, I think it will be almost guaranteed. Social media marketing is a long term game, they will have to make sure that they keep their followers engaged once the promo is over.

 

[Master Kaday]

They have done very well I agree, and made a lot of noise. I would love to see what they got out of it.

The idea of a twitter promotion is interesting in general. If 10 people ran a similar promotion then the top 10 trending topics would all be brand names. The only reason I mention this is that you have to factor in the number of times a promotion like this can be run to call them the case study of how to run promotion. I have run a similar promotion for a consumer brand myself and I think the jury is still out.

But the point still stands that being the first isn't always the be all and end all. The fact that they copied someone else and have done it slightly better is possibly more the point.

 

[Gillie]

Trouble is that should anyone now do the same thing, it will get boring and bland, so others wishing to get twitter noise, will have to make it fresh and different.

After all, there is only so many times on twitter you can hear about some celeb death as that one is now being done to (pardon the pun) death.

 

[Master Kaday]

Indeed Gillie

I still have not seen any solid proof that Twitter has been a huge revenue stream for anyone. Does giving free stuff to an indiscriminate and already tech savy audience really represent a good ROI, or is it more about the noise that they have made. As an example everyone that has entered the competition that already has a URL on their bio may have added to the noise but they are pretty unlikely to need or want the product.

As someone who has actually run a feed for a client and consulted on Twitter I still think you have to take a long term view and strategy. Concentrate on doing things right rather than getting an instant result.

The fact remains though, whatever they have got out of it, squarespace and moonfruit have so far made the most noise.

 

[wecandobiz]

As said, they are not the first. I've thought of doing it before but my fear is that Twitter would end up getting spammed and the fixing of the trending topics would cheese as many people off as it amuses.

There may be no such thing as bad press, but if your business depends on illustrating a knowledge of social media it's a double edged sword.

IH

 

[Women Unlimited]

It will be interesting to see how it progresses... Twitter is still a social experiment, however, I get more traffic from Twitter than any other source and it is a big part of my social media strategy. We're still at the beginning of using social media effectively as a marketing tool, but it HAS to be good for your business to create an ACTIVE awareness to 30000 people about your company.

 

[garyk]

Good for them I say! I think the strength (value) of the offer is what is significant. There are lots of offers which I think are just token, as someone mentioned £200 off a laptop, hardly going to have people falling over themselves is it? But 10 macbooks which you are looking at £1150 minimum price wise *is* a significant prize.

 

[Eagle]

^ Depends on your viewpoint.

 

[ethical PR]

I must get along to one of your events soon.

Regards
Helen

 

[Women Unlimited]

Hey Helen, great to see you too! Would love to catch up face to face soon!

 

[Women Unlimited]

So Moonfruit also published some of the statistics around they're promotion... http://www.moonfruitlounge.com/post/2009/07/02/Holy-Twitter-Batman-the-campaign-response

Still don't know if it's resulted in business, but would be interesting to know!