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SUMMARY

When you’ve already built a loyal customer base and still a large portion of your target community doesn’t know who you are, what do you do?

Learn how a small hosted software company used their desire to engage and amplify their fans and their adeptness for following trends to significantly increase their Twitter followers, inbound site traffic and trial accounts to results that surprised even them.

GOALS

Squarespace is a small hosted software company in Soho, NYC that offers a fully hosted, completely managed environment for creating and maintaining a website, blog or portfolio. According to Dane Atkinson, Squarespace CEO, “the company grew for years through nothing but word-of-mouth marketing among its friends and existing customers.”

Over time, Atkinson and Squarespace’s Director of Marketing, Erica Reitman, discovered podcasts as an interesting and effective customer acquisition channel.

Many podcasts are produced independently and rely on support from sponsors to continue production. When an advertiser finds success in this channel, it also wants to see the podcasters succeed and remain engaged with their brand.

The team at Squarespace decided to thank podcasters for their continued support of the Company (many of whom were now customers themselves) with an iPhone Giveaway – one per day during the month of June 2009. The contest however, was open to anyone. Many podcasters told their listeners about it which helped spread the message, but it was Twitter that rallied worldwide participation.

CAMPAIGN

Atkinson and Reitman developed a simple plan to facilitate the giveaway.

Step #1:

Follow Squarespace on Twitter at twitter.com/squarespace. This step would allow the Company to connect with interested prospects and supportive fans while enabling them to potentially interact with them over time, beyond the campaign period. (Marketers: consider it the Web 2.0 version of a House List.)

Step #2:

Once per day, post a tweet that includes the “#squarespace” hashtag.

A “hashtag” refers to keywords that are posted to twitter that have the “#” (or hash symbol) prefix. It’s simply a way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic using the hashtag as a way to add structure to the search. For instance, a tweet might not actually contain a keyword you’re searching on, but may still be relevant to your topic. A hashtag ensures that it’s included in the search.

Let’s use Macintosh computers as an example. Someone may post to Twitter:

“Can anyone recommend some good Dashboard utilities?”

Unless you’re using compound queries that included both “macintosh” and “dashboard”, the above tweet wouldn’t appear in your search results. However, if the relevant hashtag were added to the post:

“Can anyone recommend some good Dashboard utilities? #macintosh”

…relevancy would improve and your search results would bear more fruit. (Pun intended.)

Step #3:

Change step #2.

Atkinson and Reitman just couldn’t keep up with the excitement over the contest. As a result, they amended the rules so that the number of tweets a person posted about the contest didn’t increase his or her probability of winning. A single tweet was all that was required to be eligible to win on that day. (This is discussed in the full video interview on http://socialmediahacks.com)

RESULTS

Atkinson said, “The results were more than we could have hoped for,” and at times, overwhelming in both sheer volume and effectiveness.

• Twitter followers increased from 815 to 37,735 though there was some follower attrition at the end of the promotion. At the time of this writing, Squarespace followers amounted to 32,016.
• Traffic to Squarespace.com increased 60%.
• The volume of free trials increased 20%.
• Excluding targeted paid media, the quality of the organic leads coming from Twitter have proven to be better than those received from other channels.
• While no pre and post campaign research was performed, anecdotal evidence indicates that brand awareness has also increased.

HELPFUL HINTS or “How to give away an iPhone.”

As Atkinson and Reitman learned, you can’t just “give away an iPhone.” The reasons are many.

An iPhone requires a two-year contract in order to acquire one at the carrier-subsidized price. The unsubsidized price is north of $500, which will put a serious damper on your budget if you intend to give away 30 of them, as Squarespace did.

You also don’t know if your winners already have an iPhone contract with a carrier, it they’re eligible for an upgrade and can receive the subsidized price, their country of residence, etc.

If you plan a similar promotion, be sure to use the “iPhone Gift Card” which can be purchased from Apple. At $199 each, the winner of your giveaway can apply the funds to suit their own circumstances – or even use it to purchase a different product from Apple.

Useful links related to this article:

Squarespace home page:

http://squarespace.com

Squarespace blog posts:

iPhone Giveaway:

http://bit.ly/ASNDI

Contest F.A.Q.:

http://bit.ly/4zxk7C

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