How do take over twitter (without dying a la Michael Jackson)

Every now and then, you get a tweet and think, bugger me.

The old tricks just don’t go out of fashion…

Moonfruit (a web design software company) has utilised a classic give-away promotion in order to become one of the most tweeted about subjects as word of its MacBook Pro giveaway spread like wildfire across the Twitt-o-sphere.

Those canny Moonfruit boys n girls are giving away 10 MacBook Pros over the next 10 days, to mark their 10th year of operation. Brilliant! 

All you have to do to enter, is tweet the term #moonfruit, sit back, pray and cross your fingers that the algorithm will randomly choose you as a winner!

They haven’t stopped there however…

People are invited to tweet the term as many times as possible, leading to #moonfruit becoming a trending topic. Why does that matter?

Well, for those that don’t tweet, trending topics appear on the front of the Twitter site and encourage thousands more users to click and see what it is that everyone is talking about on the site.

Its a massive reason a certain King of Pop’s death literally took over the site within minutes.

Expect to see a lot more of this as the year unfolds, and not just with free giveaways.

Canny brands will no doubt utilise similar techniques to tease, taunt (another ‘t’ I can’t think of), and respond immediately to competitive campaigns with counter offers / messages etc.

2009 is hotting up…  

Iain Morrison is a senior marketer in the British Tourism Industry. And hopes you remember me if you win a laptop as a result of reading this wee post…