#tweetsmart

Chapter 18. Half-Off Hangman

Tweet this Project

I’ve made no secret of my distaste for coupon campaigns on Twitter, and it is with some reluctance that I include a coupon code project in this book. My distaste stems from the sheer laziness of the general practice. It take no effort or creativity to simply tweet out coupon or discount codes. People do not join Twitter for discounts! People join Twitter for engaging interactions with the people they know and meet. Coupon campaigns tend not to be engaging nor interactive.

And yet, Twitter coupon campaigns happen so often that people tend to come to think of Twitter marketing as nothing more than sending out coupon codes—and then, the followers who aren’t interested in marketing begin to regard these tweets as spam. It’s “bad news bears.”

Remember, there’s only one way to get unfollowed on Twitter, and that’s by annoying your audience. Even being silent is better than being annoying, and repeatedly tweeting out coupon codes runs the risk of annoying your followers. Approach with caution.

If used correctly, coupon or discount codes can be useful in engaging your audience—but only when used within the context of a more interesting project or campaign. Therefore, I’ve designed the following project to make use of coupon codes in a way that is both engaging and interactive. Hopefully, this will help reverse the trend I’m seeing of companies dumping this sort of tweet on us all:

“NOW until Christmas! 10% off all our slacks and fedoras! Use this ...