Columbia Journalism School Tests Twitter Marketing to Promote Event Ticket Sales

Twitter marketing isn’t new for subscription sites, but we rarely see a Twitter campaign for a paid event. However, since 21% of subscription content

Twitter marketing isn’t new for subscription sites, but we rarely see a Twitter campaign for a paid event. However, since 21% of subscription content sites also sell ticketed virtual events and 20% offer ticketed real-world events, I figured quite a few of you might be interested in this test.On Monday April 18th, Columbia’s marketers launched this Twitter campaign offering to drop the $150 ticket price for their upcoming Social Media Weekend by 15% if 150 people retweeted the link and hashtag. Their @columbiajourn Twitter ID had 6,300 followers.24 hours later they repeated the tweet, noting that they only needed 75 more retweets to reach their goal. Then 24 hours later, first thing this morning, they tweeted they only needed 25 more retweets. A couple of hours later, the campaign ended victoriously. So that’s 150 retweets in two and a half days.They ran the campaign via OfferPop’s platform, a SaaS. Prices range from free to $2000 per month, based on how many followers you want to get per hashtag. I bet most niche publishers would be just fine at the $50 month pricepoint which allows you up to 2,500 hashtag followers per month. Or, you can use your intern to sit there, refresh Twitter occasionally, and count hashtags by hand.(Warning, we do this for one of our publications which gets about 150-200 tweets per week from fans and followers, and the work to do it by hand is somewhat arduous when you’re in a timecrunch.)