Now I know the inevitable question you’ll be asking is “what the hell is Moonfruit?”.

Well this was their problem as well and they set about addressing the issue using social media and the power of a viral campaign in a simple and succinct way in order to raise their profile and grow brand awareness.

It proved to be incredibly effective and cost them next to nothing in comparison to a traditional marketing or brand campaign of the same potential reach. Lets have a look at how they did it.

Moonfruit Company Profile

Established since 1999, MoonFruit offer a website building or creation service using a custom drag and drop online interface.  Clients sign up and create an account and from there can begin building a website from there stock of designs and images.  The sites exist under a sub domain of Moonfruit.  A free version is available with incremental increases by month or by year depending on what package you deem to be appropriate for you and your site.

I can only speculate on how they decided to instigate this campaign but someone obviously realised that there was an opportunity here to go “global” with the brand via twitter so they brainstormed some ideals on how to make this happen and decided that a give away competition for a highly desirable product, related to their industry, that would excite the community and encourage them to grow the viral message they instigated. The product they settled on was a Mac Book Pro.

The Moonfruit Competition

The competition worked because it was simple.  Very few parameters where put in place in order to qualify for the draw allowing the message to spread quite quickly and easily and the prize was obviously, very desirable. Basically they where randomly choosing 10 people from their follower base over a 7 day period to win a MacBook Pro.

The promotion simply required you to tweet as normal and include the term “#moonfruit” in your tweets and follow Moonfruit on twitter.

This happened.

The Moonfruit twitter account, quite literally, skyrocketed from 400 followers to over 35,000 followers in about 5 days and began trending on twitter as a Hot Topic.  The campaign itself then began gaining off line media attention from local and national newspapers and TV stations and of course commentary from hundreds if not thousands of blogs and bloggers as they began commenting on this “phenomenon”.

Heres a view over the long term with Moonfruits twitter account since the competition took place.

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Now lets consider why this campaign took off and created such a ground swell so quickly. In essence the competition itself was nothing new in regards how it was formed or what it offered. Simple is best in most aspects and it worked exceedingly well in this case.  Heres some other points why it worked.

• The prize was highly desirable and sexy and relatively expensive
• The rules where simple and easy to enter
• Engagement and process was immediate via Twitter
• They listened to and adapted to the “conversation” as it developed

One interesting development of the campaign was that people began to create and mention Moonfruit in more and more interesting ways, taking photos, adding it in funny phrases and working out some interesting and fun ways of adding Moonfruit to tweets by wordplay.  Moonfruit adapted to this by offering an ipod to the best example, further encouraging the viral nature of the campaign.

Basically this campaign succeeded, and set the bar, for similar efforts to appear on twitter and in social networks for the future and indeed more campaigns just like it have been run and worked. I have no data to say how much revenue or profit was generated by the campaign but I would assume it would be quite substantial or conversely, it saved them a fortune in advertising and branding awareness efforts if not directly in services employed.

One interesting point was the amount of traffic (USA traffic only) which compete.com registered from the campaign in month 7.  A substantial increase.

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But, lets see where Moonfruit stand today. What seems to be prominent is the massive spike that the twitter campaign caused but more importantly, the two flat sections on either side of the spike serve to illustrate the long term effects of the campaign.  The sites average monthly visitor count increase by around 40k per month after the campaign completed.  A substantial increase on average. Lets take a punt at figuring out the potential income this has generated.

The Revenue Generated

The site traffic before the twitter campaign was 172k then after the spike the site traffic averaged at 207k. Ignoring any potential revenue generated within the spike itself and working on a pessimistic line lets say the increase was 40k new and repeat site visitors and only 1% of those people purchased the cheapest option available to them. Thats 400 purchases at a single payment of €33 annually or €4-50 monthly (prices are the same in USD) then minus the cost of the ten MacBook Pros which works out at about 9000 USD.

Taking the annual payment first:  400 x 33 = €13,200 – €9000 = €4,200

and the monthly revenue: 400 x 4-50 = €1,800 x 12 months = €21,600 – €9000 = €12,600

That’s with pessimistic figures… Was the campaign worthwhile in your opinion? I think so.

The Moonfruit Campaign Results

This is their current follower count today, 6 months after the end of the campaign.

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As you can see, the graph shows that MoonFruit have managed to, more or less, maintain their influx of followers, however, from the data available on the account from Twittercounter they have lost about 500 followers since the peak of the campaign. Not bad I suppose, but looking at the tweet count, its disappointing to see that they have only managed to communicate further with their followers a meagre 886 times.

Frankly that’s crap and I’m surprised that it hasn’t been engaged much more to continue listening and acting on their followers conversations.  Only time will tell I suppose.