From June 1st to June 6th, I noticed that SafeEyes (a competitor to one of my clients - Net Nanny) started getting a TON of twitter attention. I jumped over to their blog and read up on what I think turned out to be an excellent case study on buying Twitter attention.

CASE STUDYThe Situation:

Twitter can be a great tool to get people talking about your company and products/services.  However, with millions of tweets (messages on Twitter) going out every hour, it sure is tough to get enough twitter volume to make a dent and connect with your potential customers.  Such was the case for SafeEyes.

The Solution:

Tweet: Freedom from porn with #SafeEyes: RT for chance to win an iPad! http://bit.ly/ckm2F8

SafeEyes wrote a blog post, and sent out several info tweets, informing their current social network that they were going to do an iPad giveaway promo.  All you had to do was Re-Tweet (use Twitter to send out a copy message) a message/advertisement for their SafeEyes Mobile product (tweet in right inset). The total cost would be around $800 ($575 total cost to obtain iPad and ship it out + $225 estimated cost for labor to write blog post and compile Re-Tweets/choose a winner).

The Outcome:

The 6 day window during which people had to Re-Tweet (RT), proved long enough to drum up 4,304 RTs.  The majority of these RTs came from individuals who were outside of the SafeEyes current social network (meaning they probably didn't know anything about SafeEyes and were self initiating first contact with their company).  In addition to those RTs, they also received thousands of new followers. In addition to that, their still recieving between 50-75 new followers a day, even though their giveaway has been done for several days.

While I'm not priveledged to see the SafeEyes sales reports, I can only imagine that they saw at least a $4000 revenue jump, with uncounted future revenue that will come in as a result of their now continually growing social network. In addition to that, their giveaway increased their public opinion standing with an age group/demographic which is normally very antagonistic to Internet filtering, opening up long term sales possibilities for when this demographic starts having kids of their own that they want to protect from online pornography and child predators.

The big question, could buying Twitter attention work for your company?

Sure! SafeEyes produces Internet filtering software, not quite the kind of product that is really that hip with the Twitter crowd. It worked for them.

Before your business jumps in, make sure you're ready to rock and roll. You need a stellar website (GigaVero does stellar websites), a Twitter account that is at least a couple weeks out of infancy (chat us up if you need help with that - we'll give you FREE advice/help getting started), and the bandwidth needed to maintain a campaign of this measure. Also, think outside the box. Just because another company was succesful with running this campaign on Twitter doesn't mean thats the best place for your product. This same campaign could have been run on Facebook and LinkedIn.