MyEdu: Fan Us > Follow Us > Win an Ipad

A number of brands have experimented with social media-based contest giveaways, but not many have executed to the perfection demonstrated by online startup MyEdu. For a period of four weeks, MyEdu – a portal that allows college students to plan their schedule, research professors and connect with other students – randomly selected contest winners every Monday-Thursday to receive iPod touch mp3 players and every Friday selected one lucky contestant to win a new iPad.

To be eligible to win an iPod or iPad, interested visitors needed to (1) fan MyEdu on Facebook, (2) follow the company on Twitter and (3) tweet the following message:

The free @myedu account is here! To celebrate #myedu is giving out #ipad & #ipodtouches daily! Fan, Follow & RT 2 WIN! http://bit.ly/dBA95X

Winners were posted every day to a dedicated contest page on MyEdu’s website, a portion of which is shown below:

If you want to get an idea of how successful the contest was, perform a quick Twitter search for the hashtag #myedu. Every hour people are tweeting about the contest…and it’s been over for weeks! When the contest was taking place a new twitter user was blasting out this tweet every FIVE MINUTES.

Can you believe that? MyEdu was virally gaining hundreds of fans and followers every day, and it’s likely a significant percentage of these contest participants also signed up for new accounts at MyEdu.com. Even if most of the contestants didn’t sign up for accounts, the company is now directly engaged with them on Twitter and Facebook, which provides great upselling opportunities.

Kudos to MyEdu for a well executed short-term social media campaign. What do you think? Was it worth it for MyEdu to spend thousands of dollars on prizes to create the amount of buzz they did?

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