Twitter trends

Wed, Mar 11, 2009

Twitter trends

From Silicon Alley Insider: One of the top “trending” topics on Twitter is Maggiano’s, an Italian restaurant chain owned by Dallas-based Brinker International (EAT).

Why? Because Maggiano’s is encouraging Twitter users to promote the chain to their friends — by telling them to start following @maggianos. The prize? $100 in gift certificates.

“Just send the following tweet to enter: “Follow @Maggianos by 5pm CST to be entered to win $100 in Maggiano’s gift certificates.”

This is smart. In an informal count, it seems about five to ten Twitter users are tweeting Maggiano’s message every minute. Or about one every ten seconds. Maggiano’s now has 1,037 followers, and is gaining dozens per minute. That’s thousands (tens of thousands?) of ad impressions that Brinker International is getting for its $100 gift card (and whatever it’s paying someone to run the company’s Twitter account).

But just like email offers quickly became spam, this, too, could quickly get out of hand. So we hope that Twitter Inc. has a trick up its sleeve to let users filter out commercial messages.

Silicon Alley Insider