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A Viral Tweet Strategy from the Music Industry
by Antone Roundy | 2 Comments | Premium Content, Viral
You may have heard of this strategy for getting a tweet to go viral: offer a freebie, but only make it available after a certain number of people have tweeted a link to your offer. Sounds great, but will it work for you? (How can you make it work?)
Over at Mashable today, Brenna Ehrlich posted something that got me thinking about that:
On Tuesday, musician St. Vincent (a.k.a Annie Erin Clark) launched a Twitter campaign asking fans to tweet #strangemercy to unlock a new track from her upcoming album, Strange Mercy.
A few days and 5,000 tweets later, the track has finally been set loose on the world...
A musician with a following may be able to muster 5000 tweets in a few days. But not all of us are in that league. St. Vincent has 392,713 followers, so she only needed a 1.3% response rate to pass 5000.
Here are a few keys to making this strategy work for you, no matter how big or small your following is:
- Establish expectations. Someone who doesn't know the quality of your work is a lot less likely to tweet for you than someone who knows from experience that you can deliver the goods. Give away something else, no strings attached, to prove that your viral freebie is worth tweeting for. For example, you might give away the first chapter to two of an eBook, and ask for a certain number of tweets to unlock the rest of it.
- Start small. If you've only got 100 followers, don't ask for 5000 tweets. Ask for 10 or 20 (adjust the number as appropriate depending on how many of your followers you're actively engaged with). Your first offer will get you some new followers and establish a track record. Next time, you'll be able to ask for more.
- Use a limited-time offer. What I mean by that is that you could ask for 10 tweets. When you get them, make the full download available for 24 hours. Then ask for 15 more to open it up for another 24 hours, etc. Just be sure to notify those who tweeted for you, and if they miss the 24 hour window, give them a copy anyway. The point of the time limit isn't to lock your friends out, but to enable you to get more tweets for the same offer with less risk of failing to ever reach the threshold.
July 22nd, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Haha. Clever ending!
I did something similar once as a musician. I had a drawing for whoever was subscribed to my mailing list by a certain date. For anyone whose e-mail address was chosen in the drawing, they would win a free physical copy of my EP shipped to them in the mail. I promoted the contest in various message boards related to the kind of music I made. It got a little bit of attention and grew my list pretty quickly (not that it's anywhere near as big as 5,000 people or anything, but there was still a decent return rate).
For something like my drawing, the incentive to subscribe can be higher because the prize is a physical, tangible item. St. Vincent's incentive is high, too; a free track without any gamble to whoever does something as simple as posting a tweet. If the reward high enough, people will be motivated to do things in order to get it (subscribe, retweet, take a survey, comment on or favorite a YouTube video, etc)
July 28th, 2012 at 9:57 pm
As a marketer, many of us are always on the lookout for unique and interesting techniques that we can use to give our campaigns and promotions an edge. This post is giving us a really cool idea that I think a lot of marketers could use to their great advantage.
By offering a freebie, that will be available only after a certain number of tweets (or downloads, or whatever) is a great idea to try and sort of force your information to go viral. Certainly, this would work much better for those who have large followings already, but I imagine something like this, if the offer itself was promoted correctly, has great potential to really build a list very fast.
Ways to use this? I would use this on my website as well as on Facebook and Twitter. The offer itself could be promoted through message boards, forums and other blogs. I think the main purpose of something like this would be to grow your mailing list. If the offer itself goes viral, you could even be sitting on a really large number of new subscribers very quickly. What a great idea this could be!