For its tenth birthday, web hosting company Moonfruit, gave away a Macbook Pro laptop every day for ten days. To win one, users had to tweet using the hashtag #moonfruit. The result? A 350% increase in product trials, a 600% increase in traffic… and Twitter forcibly removing it from the top trending topics.
The hashtag #moonfruit topped Twitter's trending lists for three days, accounting for 2.5% of all tweets at its peak. People drew pictures, made videos and sang songs about the brand in a bid to win the laptops. The secret to the success of the campaign, spearheaded by founder Wendy Tan-White, was engagement.
"The biggest surprise was the brand affinity and awareness it created. The name of the company helped a lot, because people asked what it meant. They really picked up on the message we wanted to get across. They made the brand their own and we couldn't have done that without Twitter. It creates a relationship," Tan-White said.
However, the campaign has come under criticism for encouraging people to ‘spam’ their friends. Speaking to NMA, Dell’s head of digital media communications EMEA Kerry Bridge said she considered the Moonfruit campaign to be spam. “Twitter should be an extension of relationships with customers and not spamming. It’s a relationship-building tool and companies should stick to that.”
Despite the success of the campaign, it would be difficult to replicate. As one of the first of its kind, the Moonfruit campaign was well timed, before consumers become jaded with hashtag marketing, not to mention the precedent now set by Twitter on more editorially controlled trending topics.
