Moonfruit became the most tweeted company in the world by using a contest

Moonfruit is a London based company that developed a free website builder, which is used by a couple million users. These days, Moonfruit marks 10 years on the market, so the guys thought they should advertise this and run a 10 days campaign. How? Using Twitter. What was the budget for the campaign? Most probably, around $20,000. What are the results? After the first day, HUGE! Let’s see the details.

Moonfruit will spend around $20,000 with a campaign that’s going to be one of the most successful you’ve ever seen on Twitter.

Basically, the company gives away 10 laptops (MacBook Pro), one for each day of the campaign. The mechanism is pretty simple: to enter the competition, you have to tweet about the contest using the hashtag #moonfruit, and eventually, give a link to the contest details page. At the end of the day, the computer will chose the winner.

Huge results!

What happened? In about 24 hours, #moonfruit became the most discussed topic on Twitter, leaving behind any discussion about Michael Jackson or the Iran revolution. After just one day, everyone seems to be tweeting about Moonfruit’s contest. The millions of tweets made the news to Brand Republic, and had a huge effect over the company’s website, similar to the “digg-effect”. While I’m writing this article, moonfruit.com is down.

What does that mean? Well, it means if you understand how to use Twitter, you can get a hell of a feedback from your audience. Basically, Moonfruit became the most tweeted company in the world. That’s a huge brand exposure and one of the best PR campaigns I’ve seen lately. And it was made with a relatively small budget.

How can you do that?

Yesterday, I published an article with 10 great tips to develop a strong relationship to your Twitter followers. I clicked the publish button just 5 minutes before the first tweet about the Moonfruit contest arrived in my Twitter dashboard. One of the tips was just this one: make contests! That’s what Moonfruit did, and look at the huge success of this campaign! Here’s the article, go check it out.