Jul 8th, 2009| 
Before the start of summer, I had ordered over 300 branded beach balls to be used for some promotional offer with Severa Corp. While I was sweating out the heat wave with my colleagues in Severa’s Headquarters in Eastern Finland, a light bulb went off… “Hey, how about we use those beach balls to get more Twitter followers?” That sounded like a good idea. So my team including Tiina Rossi (Social Media Expert) and Henri Årgen (Art Guru) got busy to launch “Follow us on Twitter and win a beach ball campaign.” The landing page below explains the idea in more detail.
This is the ninth day since the program was launched and it’s been great! We have doubled our Follower count from 4,700 to 9,400.
And not only that, we are getting genuine followers who contribute to our social network. We have increased the following:
- Meaningful conversations through direct messages
- Frequency of our ReTweets
- Higher website traffic referred from Twitter
In fact, here are some of our website traffic stats on unique visitors that were referred from Twitter:
| Avg from June 1 to June 28
(before the beach ball campaign) |
Avg from June 29 to July 8
(during the beach ball campaign) |
|
| Avg Time on Site | approx. 3 minutes | approx. 5 minutes |
| Bounce Rate | 40% | 48% |
| Goal Conversion Rate | 6% | 8% |
In the last week, we have had more Twitter traffic than in the last 2 months. With this increase, we also have a slight raise in bounced traffic – which is understandable since we get more “passer bys.” What’s most interesting is that, people who do stay, end up on our site for 5 minutes (2 minutes longer than before.) This means they are genuinely interested in our offering and that also explains why our conversion rates are higher now as well.
Over all, the Beach ball for Twitter follow has been a successful campaign thanks to my Marketing Team. Within 9 days we doubled our follower count, we increased relevant traffic and we raised our conversion rate. This really was a good idea to kick start our summer!
If you want you can follow Severa on Twitter too – perhaps, you may win a beach ball.
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July 8th, 2009 at 12:27
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
July 8th, 2009 at 12:57
Great Twitter campaign and I like how you frame your results without bogging too deeply into the nitty gritty. Perfect score all around.
July 9th, 2009 at 05:21
Amazing results considering prize’s value, that’s what I call an effective ROI!
BTW you have commented on several analytics tools before, but from which one you actually get these metrics?
July 9th, 2009 at 05:25
I use Google Analytics the most and thats what I used here. Which one do you like, prefer and why?
July 9th, 2009 at 13:53
I have worked with some tools for specific tasks like sitemeter, feedblitz, outbrain, cooleremail. But at some point they are like “toys” with limited capabilities.
Joomla package gives you nice metrics but sometimes they’re hard to find and read.
Going up! has a nice graphic interface, visually more understandable.
Piwik is not bad, but not user-friendly enough.
So definitely for mkt purposes I still keep using Google Analytics. Only need to improve my SEO/SEM skills more (that’s why I follow this blog
July 22nd, 2009 at 16:42
I am finding it fascinating how certain companies are grabbing technology and running away with the “ball” so to speak. Nice article and great campaign.
I’ll be watching for more great stuff from you folks.
July 10th, 2010 at 20:01
You’ve got balls! Thats all I can say
.