Starbucks’ Free Pastry Day = Twitter Win!

If you aren’t in the social media loop, something very interesting happened today on Twitter all courtesy of Starbucks.

Starbucks ran a promotion giving away a free pastry with the purchase of any beverage.  The purpose of this promotion was to introduce people to Starbucks new pastries that are without the artificial flavors, dyes, transfats, and high fructose corn syrup.

As for coupon control, Starbucks required that you had to show a coupon in order to receive the pastry. Displaying the fact that they are inline with technology, you could either print out the coupon or show the coupon on your phone.

With the promotion being run from opening until 10:30 am, Starbucks #FreePastryDay is a perfect example of how powerful a medium Twitter is.I decided to monitor this promotion from 8:30 am until 3:00 pm Eastern Standard Time and the final statistics were very interesting.

In just 2 short hours, Starbucks went from being the #4 Trending Topic on Twitter to #2 (as of  press time, they were the #8 Trending Topic).  During the monitored timeframe, there were more than 17,942 Tweets that included the word Starbucks.

The most tweets consisted of people praising Starbucks’ coffee, pastry, and ability to handle such a large promotion.  Some people were dismayed by their local Starbucks running out of pastries, but Starbucks did inform people from the beginning the promotion was while supplies last.

All in all, Starbucks’ #FreePastryDay promotion was a Twitter Win.  Not only did they have a lot of people talking about them (including American Idol host @RyanSeacrest), but they had people passing around the coupons via re-tweets for hours.

For everyone that is big on seeing a ROI from social media marketing, just think about this…even though Starbucks gave away a free pastry, they still required people to purchase a beverage.  No minimum purchase amount was set, so a regular customer probably purchased their regular drink.  As for the people that don’t go to Starbucks on a daily basis, they decided to go today because they had the opportunity to receive a free pastry.

The redistribution and the ease of coupon use was the driving force behind the in-store traffic, and Starbucks stores probably made more today than they will for the remainder of the week.

That’s why Starbucks #FreePastryDay is a Twitter success and a good example of how social media marketing can increase your ROI.

– @imarketu