Research In Motion's latest Twitter marketing offer was a t-shirt giveaway for their UK followers. Every 10th person to follow the BlackBerry Twitter Account and retweet the following message won this shirt:
Follow us & RT this tweet by 5pm GMT for your chance to win a BBM T-shirt! Every 10th tweet wins! (UK ONLY) #BBMT4MeUK
In a few hours, their original tweets and hashtag received over 450 retweets! Since twitter shows 100+ instead of the exact number of retweets, its likely they actually received thousands of RT's.
Furthermore, this promotion spread deep into friends of friends of followers through 3+ levels of retweeting.
To build additional excitement, follow up tweets were posted every few minutes during the contest announcing the latest winners. There were 56 winners announced before the promotion ended a few hours after it started:
I'm curious how they collected 50+ mailing addresses and shirt sizes through direct messages. Generally DM's dont work too well because BlackBerry needs to be following the winner before the winner can send a DM to BlackBerry. With a limit of 140 characters per DM, any back-and-forth questions, incomplete addresses, or missing shirt sizes can be a nightmare. Handling the data collection through a structured form (with validation) or at a minimum via email would be much easier. Having traditional contact info on file in case of a delivery issue or problem is always a good idea too.
All in all, a great social media promotion. Congrats BlackBerry!
Emily Bejach
September 20, 2010
11:02 am
This is a very good marketing plan and I think you should do this contest again. These shirts don’t hardly cost you anything in face you probably get them free with a sponsorship and now you have tons and tons of people following you on twitter and creating buzz. What a way to score some free advertising that is actually beneficial.