ICM - Leeds Design Agency

A few weeks back, Moonfruit – the free online website building service, was offering free Apple Macbooks in return for people spreading the Moonfruit brand across Twitter in the form of a #moonfruit hashtag.

One person per day was then picked at random and handed one of Apple’s shiny laptops, a pretty good way of instant brand exposure. So what was the outcome?

Moonfruit had over 200,000 mentions, around 45,000 new followers and a 600% increase in traffic to the website resulting in a 100% increase in new sign-ups to the Moonfruit service over the seven days the competition ran for. Plus there was the other media coverage of Moonfruit’s Twitter campaign which went worldwide.

So far so good, everything sounds rosy. But towards the end of the week-long campaign, many Twitter users were getting pretty tired of seeing #moonfruit tagged onto the end of every tweet. People started to unfollow and since the competition ended no-one mentions #moonfruit very much.

So is there a lesson to learn from this? I suppose dangling the carrot in front of your target audience for the sole purpose of brand recognition may return fantastic results, but it seems to be a quick-fix, will the long-term brand reputation stay strong? I’m not so sure.

Having said all this, I have tweeted with the hashtag #mpora with a chance to win one of four Macbooks being given away by Mpora the action sports website. Maybe this is the second wave of social-media brand-flooding – there’s no hard sell, no forms to fill in, no email to submit, just a competition.

Wish me luck!