Tuesday, 7 July 2009
How Moonfruit Achieved 10,000% Increase in Twitter Followers in One Week
Moonfruit, a UK company which providers software that allows people with no design ability to build websites, has been the focus of lots of attention recently because of a hugely successful Twitter promotion that saw a 10,000% increase in twitter followers and a doubling in the number of people trialling their website building software.
The Offer
The offer Moonfruit used to achieve this dramatic result was quite simple, they asked Twitter users to ‘tweet’ the term ‘moonfruit’ in their twitter updated and follow them to be eligible to win one of 10 macbook pros.
The Results
In the space of about 3 days, the Moonfruit campaign had exploded, taking them from roughly 400 followers to over 30,000.
They also managed to achieve a wide range of media coverage and have the term ‘moonfruit’ ranked as on of Twitter ‘Trending Terms’ (a listing of the top mentioned terms on twitter, e.g. Wimbledon).
Why It Worked
There’s nothing ground breaking about the actual promotion, companies and marketers have for years offered sweepstakes and prizes to customers. But there are a couple of key elements that contributed to the success of this campaign on Twitter.
1) Suiting the prize to the audience
It’s hard to imagine many people that wouldn’t want the chance of winning a new laptop, just by adding a simple word to their Twitter status updates. However, Twitter is an especially well targeted audience for this. Twitter users are obviously heavy internet users, possibly posting to the site while on the move (i.e. from a laptop). Also, judging by various trending topics in Twitter, there are quite a lot of passionate Mac fans on the site. If Moonfruit had been offering drills or lawn mowers, or even free subscriptions to their service, the uptake probably wouldn’t have been as good.
2) Valuable prize
Most of us have grown accustomed to the countless iPod give-aways. Moonfruint upped the stakes considerably here by offering 10 MacBook Pro laptops each worth around £900 (well over $1000). This got people’s attention and compared with the cost of entering (simply adding the term ‘moonfruit’ to one of your twitter updates) made it a no-brainer for even the most jaded Twitter users.
3) Interactivity
Traditionally when a company offers some sort of promotion through its print and TV advertising, customers that participate are kept at arms length. In the case of the Moonfruit promotion, there was an immediate and direct connection between Moonfruit and the competition participants. Users were able to directly express their enthusiasm (or disdain) to Moonfruit, who in turn were able to respond directly to these individuals.
This is an important factor as it highlights the real power of social media websites like twitter than remove traditional barriers between companies and their target audience.
4) Flexibility
In reality, Moonfruit didn’t run just one promotion, they soon realised that many participants were using their ‘moonfruit’ key term in very amusing and creative ways.
Image uploaded by Twitter user @BramKetting
Instead of just ignoring this user-generate twist on their promotion, they encouraged and rewarded it by adding a second prize for ‘most creative’ use of the term Moonfruit. The winner of which would receive an iPod.
This was possible because Moonfruit was very diligent about collecting information on its campaign from Twitter, i.e it listened very closely to the conversation about its brand. It also cleverly leveraged Twitters super-efficient information dissemination to update people on the status of the competition and the new prize category.
Closing thoughts
Nobody can deny the success of this campaign at achieving a huge amount of buzz for Moonfruit. The issue now will be to see how much of this attention translates to actual business for Moonfruit, although initial boosts in users trialling their software bode well.
It will also be interesting to see how many of their newly won followers stick with them when the buzz of the competition dies down. I would imagine, however, that now they have proven the success of the Twitter channel, the will run more competitions and even divert more of their marketing budget to Twitter.
No doubt we’ll be seeing a lot of agencies and brands trying to duplication this success, but I don’t hold high expectations for these attempts if they don’t provide something that the Twitter user-base actually wants (in this case Macbooks), they’ll also have to demonstrate the humility, authenticity and creativity that Moonfruit possessed.
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