#TLHIGHFIVE0: 50,000 high fives for our 50,000 followers (Win a FareCard Contest)
#TLHIGHFIVE0: 50,000 high fives for our 50,000 followers (Win a FareCard Contest)
It feels like it was just yesterday when we were celebrating 40,000 followers on Twitter, but now we have 50,000 of you following us and counting!
The @TransLink Twitter account got its start in February 2010 during the Winter Olympics, providing riders with breaking news and key service updates.
But it didn’t start answering questions from tweeps until November 2010 when a one-month pilot project was launched. It was extended multiple times before becoming a permanent service in February 2011!
Today, Customer Information staff are on Twitter from 6:30 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., seven days a week, to answer all your service-related questions and provide service updates, tips, and information to 50,000+ of you!
#TLHIGHFIVE0 #50K followers! THANK YOU for your continuous support! ^TLTwitterTeam
— TransLink BC (@TransLink) August 25, 2014
Contest time!
To celly, we’re going to give away three FareCards! To enter, simply follow @TransLink and retweet one of the following tweets from our Twitter team:
Contest closes at 11:59 p.m. on Thursday, September 11 and we’ll randomly select a winner on Friday, September 12. The FareCard will be for one, two, or three zones, depending on where the winner travels. You’ll want to read the terms and conditions for all the details on the contest.
One person cannot win more than once, so if we draw your name, you will be excluded from the other FareCard draws.
Author: Allen Tung
Haven’t spam contests like this entered the realm of poor taste yet? Are these marketing tactics still accepted and considered popular? I had higher hopes.
Hi Ben: Our intention isn’t to spam. We want to spread the word that us being able to provide customer service on Twitter is a direct result of our Twitter community. Tell me, if we were to do a similar contest in the future, what hopes would you have for it? Maybe we can learn from you ideas!
I’m not sure. I probably would never run such a contest.
TransLink made some mis-steps with the Twitter account when it first debuted (e.g. shrill PSA messages ad nauseam) which made it difficult to use as an information source. There was a period of time that I monitored such tweets for breaking transit information. In the last couple of years I’ve found Twitter just too much work to keep up with, so I don’t even look at @TransLink any more, frankly.
I suppose that maybe I’m just outside the popular demographic for Twitter users.
@ Ben
I think that you are in the majority. Hundreds of thousands of riders use transit, and only 50,000 of them bother to connect with Translink? Millions of Twitter users are out there.
@ Translink
If your intent isn’t to spam, then why are you sending out unsolicited messages? Why are you encouraging others to send out messages? Some times it is good for people to tell their friends, but as we can see on Facebook, people can be inconsiderate and send out unwanted messages about Facebook games. Legally, you aren’t sending out spam, but that seems to be all that you are concerned about, which is a very ice cold corporate attitude.
If you want to get us to tell our friends, then remove all incentives to win a prize. Encourage us to tell our friends, if we think that they will be interested. If we don’t tell our friends, then let that be your feedback. Obviously, we’re trying to protect our friends from you. Unfortunately, once you offer a prize we tend to throw consideration out the window.
Ben: Thanks for the reply. Yes, Twitter can be a difficult beast to navigate and to filter out info for sure.
Eugene: Twitter is just one of many ways we try our best to communicate with our riders. As for contests, we try not to do too many. This particular contest is celebrate a milestone and giving away FareCards is a way to say thanks to those who value our service. However, both your comments and Ben’s have given us food for thought for when and if we do similar contests in the future. Thanks.
I’m glad that sharing my opinion has been helpful.
However, let’s call a spade a spade: you are giving away FareCards not to thank those “who value [your] service”, but to thank those people who re-tweet a canned message to all of their followers (that is, who peform a marketing act on behalf of TransLink).
You may wish the two groups to be the same—and in fact, there probably IS a large overlap in that Venn diagram—but one does not logically follow from the other, and that type of equivocation can lead to incorrect conclusions.
Hi Ben: Point taken. Thanks for the comment.