Chris Webb

I witnessed an interesting use of Twitter today by  Chelsea Green Publishers who promoted their website and books with a very simple contest.

The premise was very straight forward – tweet about a book from their website that you would like to read. The 10th person to tweet a book wins the book tweeted. Free book, free shipping. Easy, right?

There are several things I like about the way Chelsea Green ran this contest including:

1. You have to follow them on Twitter to be eligible
2. They have built “Tweet this book” links into each product page that includes a link to the book, as well as hashtags.
3. They primed the contest with a countdown which was re-tweeted several times to spread the word.

So, how did they do on the first run? Some quick stats:

• Total contest time was approximately 4 minutes
• Total contestants was 27
• Total tweets (entries) was 45

At first glance these look like really small numbers, but consider how many others saw these tweets.  According to my quick study via search.twitter.com it appears that these 45 tweets reached 14,216 Twitter users. And each of those 14,000+ users was sent a book title, hashtags, and a direct link to the book’s product page. And, those 14,000+ followers does not include any users who may be consuming searches for the variety of hastags or terms that were part of those tweets.

As a bonus, it appears the Huffington Post re-tweeted at least one funny entry from @daveburdick (over 5000 followers of the 14,000+ total.)

So if you ask me, reaching 14,000 people in the span of less than 5 minutes is pretty good. Of course, we don’t yet know how many of those, if any, clicked through to the publisher’s website, nor how many purchased books.

But, Chelsea only spent some time and the cost of one book plus shipping to try this experiment, which I think is important to do. We need to experiment a little more.  All in all I think it is a very clever use of Twitter to perhaps gain some awareness of the publisher and their books.

What do you think? Productive use of Twitter, or social media folly? What other examples have you seen?