Maggiano’s Gives Away Food to Gain Twitter Followers
Here’s a social media promotion that will likely be effective, but not nearly as edgy as what Skittles is doing: free food. Maggiano’s, the Italian restaurant chain, is offering up a $100 gift card if you simply tweet “Follow @Maggianos by 5pm CST to be entered to win $100 in Maggiano's gift certificates.”
It would seem that the contest is already a success, with “Magginao’s” shooting up the charts to become a Twitter trending topic as of 1:30pm CST. It's easy to explain why: the potential reward ($100 gift card) far outweighs the cost of sending a tweet. The only drawback is that you do need to shamelessly promote Maggiano’s to your followers, which, could feel rather invasive to some.
Not surprisingly, giving stuff away is proving a good formula for gaining a Twitter following. Recently, domain registrar NameCheap held a holiday trivia contest that rewarded followers with free domain names for correctly answering questions and saw their following explode, as you can see in the chart below.
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