Anatomy of a failed Twitter Campaign

After getting the “@kiva” name on twitter I wanted to get the word out that Kiva.org now officially had a twitter presence that people could remember.  Prior to that we had been using @kivacs and @kivadotorg, and people were mistakenly assuming that we were @kiva.

Inspired by Charlie O’Donnell’s co-opting of Follow Friday to promote the launch of his company, path101, i wanted to do the same for Kiva.  The idea was to get as many people as possible recommending @kiva for Follow Friday using the #followfriday hashtags, in the hopes of gaining 1k followers.  To set the scene, we emailed all of kiva’s mailing lists (700+) and 20+ of the top people I could think of on Twitter (which isn’t exactly an impressive list).

Here are the rough stats we got on Follow Friday May the 15th (which we started with around 2400 followers):

New Followers :200

Follow Friday Recommendations : 90

I did a quick run through of those 90 people who gave us a shout out, and combined they had 46,000 followers.  Thats 500 followers on average, so we’re not talking about a bunch of new accounts here.

We also posted about the initiative to our blog, and to our Facebook page, which had 40k fans at the time. Later in the day 2pm PST, we even got posted on@micah’s (the creator of follow friday) www.followfridays.com Feature Followers section.

Here’s what the day looked like on TwitterCounter, you can just barely see the graph curve up a bit more  on May 15th  We went up from gaining an average of a 150 users each day to over 200:

Since my goal for the day had been to add 1k new followers, I was a bit dissapointed.  I’d love to know what other people expect when doing this kind of campaign.  My buddy Dan Martell has a similar post on his blog, which can be used as a comparable.  A guest blogger, @coryschop , does an 8 hour experiment and gains 83 new followers.