I’ve recently been working on a project for one of my clients at Rabbit, low cost airline bmibaby, called Free Flight Follow Friday.
Essentially, it’s a competition whereby you can nominate your friends to win one of three pairs of free bmibaby flights each week by using the hahstag #ffff (that’s right, free flight follow Friday) on Twitter. I can assure you it’s not the crux of our online comms for bmibaby, but it’s the first thing we’ve put into the wild, not only for them, but as Rabbit (having launched a mere 2 months ago).
Competitions on Twitter are hardly new, but many of them have a decidedly spammy edge to them, which we wanted to avoid, completely. It doesn’t do a brand any favours, and as an avid Twitter fan I’d hate to be seen to be cluttering up my beloved Twittersphere with rubbish. See: Anyone who makes you retweet a tweet to enter a competition.
Instead we decided to tap into existing user behaviour, in the form of the Twitter tradition, Follow Friday. Let’s be honest: we all know it’s an ego massage between Twitter friends, I’m certain 99.9% of people don’t actually look through the people being recommended to them. But it is nice to be nominated, and even better when that nomination could turn into a free flight.
I really feel like we entered some kind of social media lion’s den with this – Twitter can be a snarky, pious, cliquey place at times, and in addition we’re wide open to criticism from our competitiors. Yet somehow, so far, have emerged alive! Initial reaction has been great, and I’m looking forward to see it develop organically over the next few weeks.
I thought it was just my (outside) perception of Twitter, but yeah, I think it’s quite cliquey too. Which is kinda sad considering it’s a social network. But then IRL is quite cliquey too, so it’s quite normal I suppose.