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On Monday, Newcastle Brown Ale launched its “Follow the Money” campaign, promising to pay each of the first 50,000 new Twitter followers one millionth of a million dollars… that means each person will get $1. Doesn’t sound like a bad trade-off for anyone; Newcastle gets 50,000 new followers, and 50,000 people get a dollar they didn’t otherwise have. If you haven’t already seen it, below is the original post to Newcastle’s Twitter page.
Follow Newcastle to get a check for one millionth of a million dollars, which is actually $1. http://t.co/I7jxS5s9Li http://t.co/Y3UdOebShE
— Newcastle Brown Ale (@Newcastle) June 2, 2014
It’s a novel approach to growing Twitter followers compared to the traditional organic method, which can take months or even years, and vastly different from Twitter’s Promoted Accounts ad product. While Twitter’s rules prohibit “buying followers”, Newcastle readily admits that they “really do want 50,000 more Twitter followers”, as told to Adweek. The success of the campaign is yet to be seen, but it is worth noting that in only three days the brand’s Twitter account gained nearly 10K new followers and generated an additional ten thousand social actions across social channels (i.e. Facebook ‘Likes’ and shares; Twitter replies, retweets, and favorites; and YouTube video views). As of this post, the Newcastle account has grown to 30,000 followers, well on its way to reach its 50,000 new follower goal.
We truly do appreciate Newcastle’s unique marketing approach to growing their followers and it does have its benefits:
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A fixed cost per follower since Newcastle is guaranteed to only pay $1 per follow and not a penny more.
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The strong possibility that Newcastle will gain more than 50,000 followers.
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Earned organic awareness across Twitter as more people retweet, reply, or talk about the brand and the promotion.
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Press and attention around the promotion via marketing publications, television discussions, online forums, and various articles (like this one!).
Before brands abandon Promoted Accounts in favor of imitating this pay-to-follow promotion, however, we wanted to identify several shortfalls that only Twitter’s Promoted Accounts can address:
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Paying users to follow will create a low quality pool of followers that may have little to no affinity for your brand. This weakens the effect of organic messaging and limits the efficacy of targeting followers.
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Twitter’s robust targeting capabilities enable marketers to reach audiences based on interests, conversations, and even followers that look like existing followers. This becomes an issue when existing followers don’t have a unifying characteristic and makes future paid efforts less efficient.
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Once users get their $1, what’s to stop them from un-following Newcastle? If that was the only connection between brand and user, some of the money spent will certainly go to waste. Promoted Accounts mitigates this risk by helping reach the right users with an opt-in follow.
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Don’t chance getting your account suspended by breaking Twitter’s rules.
SHIFT has long held the position that a strong base of followers is essential for any brand to succeed on social. While it shouldn’t be the end goal, growing followers quickly enables brands to then engage with and activate users through both paid and organic efforts. To read more about the importance of followers and how to begin moving users through the social funnel, check out these posts on Twitter Marketing and the Social Funnel: Exposure & Influence (Part 1) and Engagement & Conversion (Part 2). To put it bluntly, the benefits to this type of campaign are fleeting. Press coverage and organic awareness will fall off as more brands mimic this tactic. Promoted Accounts campaigns on the other hand are unique to individual advertisers and help grow a follower base comprised of the users that will continue to engage with the brand beyond the current campaign.
This brings up the question whether Newcastle was unaware of Promoted Accounts or simply chose to ignore it benefits. Knowing that Newcastle is a smart brand (see their Super Bowl promotion), we think that they’re very aware of the benefits of using Promoted Accounts over this pay-to-follow approach and they wouldn’t have just ignored the benefits. After a review of the promotion’s terms and conditions we don’t think it’s about follower growth at all (gasp!). For $1 per person, Newcastle all of a sudden has the right to use their new follower’s “name, likeness, photograph, voice, opinions and/or hometown and state for promotional purposes in any media, worldwide, without further payment or consideration.” Paying for the right to use followers in future promotions makes much more sense than paying for an inefficient growth in followers not using Promoted Accounts.
So as a user, earn your dollar by visiting Newcastle’s Twitter page and giving them the right to use your likeness. As a marketer, reach out to our team at info@shift.com to learn how you can efficiently and effectively grow a strong follower base and engage them to improve your marketing ROI. Once you achieve that marketing success, feel free to celebrate with a hearty cheers and an ice-cold beverage of your choice.