Starbucks has recently launched a new contest on their blog named “The Red Up Contest” in an effort to get their customers to share their Instagram pictures featuring Starbucks’ infamous red holiday cups. The contest began on November 1, 2014 and ends on November 3, 2014. The 5 winners of the contest will receive a jewelry-quality 925 sterling silver Starbucks card worth $200.
Starbucks is using Instagram as the platform for their contest—and it is a genius way to use this great app! According to Starbucks, the contest is only open to photographers and people in the US. Instagram was originally made for photographers to enhance their photographs with filters, vignettes, and other tools and share them with others. Soon enough, the app blew up in the social media world and it is now part of the “Big 9” social media networks.
In this class, we have spoken about how we can possibly utilize this image-friendly app in a way that gets customers to want to buy from a certain brand. Starbucks has it all figured out! Because all of the contestants must take a photo of the Starbucks red cup, they must first go to their nearest Starbucks location and purchase coffee to get a hold of one of them. Not only is that bringing brand awareness, but also helps them increase their sales in the duration of the contest. The impressions that the contest is making is in the thousands, since the followers of those people who are uploading their contest photo onto their accounts are seeing them. Starbucks also introduced a hashtag that must be used to track the photos (#redcupcontest) and can simultaneously be used on Twitter as well. So far, the hashtag has made 27,000+ impressions on Twitter.
*Tweet Reach search and screenshot were made by me.
So far, this seems to be a pretty good way to get customers to come into Starbucks and purchase one or multiple drinks. It is using an app that is pretty tough to use if a company does not have good visuals, and of course is tapping into the social media gold mine.
What do you all think about this contest? Do you think it is pretty effective? Did you even know that it was going on? I stumbled upon it on Twitter. Leave a comment below!
Ashlie Garcia: Online Advertising & PR 
I just heard about this contest yesterday and I was thinking about posting a picture! I think this is a great way to engage with the consumers because it’s easy, people use Instagram everyday and the incentive is huge. This relates to Sam’s post on the different apps to enhance your pictures. The main reason I didn’t enter the contest was because I didn’t think that I took cool enough pictures with nice edits to win the contest. Using the apps that Sam mentioned probably helped a lot of people out during this contest. This is also a great contest because Starbucks consumers already posts their purchases to social media sites ALL THE TIME! Why not post one and maybe win something from it?
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Yes. use my apps! It is interesting that you said you didn’t want to enter because you didn’t think your entry would be good enough to win. I’m sure Starbucks’ intention was not to make the contest elitist and discourage people from posting because they thought they weren’t going to win. Perhaps in the future, Starbucks should give away smaller prizes just for posting, instead of just being judged on the quality of picture. This would encourage everyone to take part instead of just those who think they have good photography skills.
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Yeah, I was saw no point in participating because I automatically assumed that I wouldn’t win. I think the idea of a prize for taking part in the contest is a good idea, maybe a coupon or discount on their next purchase. This smaller incentive would probably also increase participation.
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That is exactly what I was thinking! Starbucks is already pretty popular, so having a quick contest like this one is bound to have some sort of buzz going around.
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I wonder what their competitors will do to stand out, like Dunkin Donuts.
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Ashlie, I like the idea of this campaign because, as you mentioned in your post, it effectively utilizes Instagram to get customers to produce Starbucks’ advertizing content. However, for such a large company, I would have expected the campaign to have made a larger impression on Twitter, probably in the hundreds of thousands of impressions. It also interests me that the campaign is only lasting three days. To me, this feels like a very short period of time to run a contest. By the time word starts to spread about the competition, the contest will have ended and users will be discouraged from supporting the campaign. Therefore, I would have run the campaign for at least a couple of weeks.
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I thought that the contest would have a lot more impressions as well– but being that it only took place for three days and it was through their blog and not their actual website, I knew it wasn’t going to have hundreds of thousands of impressions in that short amount of time. They tweeted about it, but that only reached their Twitter followers. I checked their Facebook page and they did not even mention the contest on there, missing out on 37 million+ people. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t really enjoy having to pick 5 winners out of 37 million people. I also think that the prize wasn’t that great of an incentive for that many people to want to participate. It was more for photographers than anyone, and some people just decided to participate as well.
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Hi Sam!
The Twitter contest almost undoubtedly had a much larger overall reach, even for a contest only lasting three days; our TweetReach snapshot reports, however, are limited in what they can capture, especially with something so high volume as a contest run by Starbucks!
Our free snapshots include up to 50 tweets and full snapshots ($20 or included in a TweetReach Pro subscription) include up to 1,500 tweets, both from the past couple days (up to one week back in many cases). You can learn more here if you’re interested: https://tweetreach.com/products/snapshots/.
Love the conversation you two are having around this contest. Starbucks has fantastic engagement with their customers everywhere.
-Sarah A. Parker
Social Media Manager | Union Metrics
Fine makers of TweetReach, Union Metrics for Tumblr, and Union Metrics for Instagram
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Hi Ashlie!
I love your use of the TweetReach snapshot report to get an idea of the size of the reach of #redcupcontest on Twitter! Starbucks really knows their cross-platform promotions. Thanks for linking back to us, and let us know if you ever have any questions about using TweetReach!
-Sarah A. Parker
Social Media Manager | Union Metrics
Fine makers of TweetReach, Union Metrics for Tumblr, and Union Metrics for Instagram
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