Twitter Goes Red

By Carly

Today, December 1, is World AIDS Day, and the (RED) campaign teamed up with Twitter to increase advocacy.In a “so simple it’s brilliant” move, any person who tweets with the hash tags #red or #laceupsavelives saw the font turn red today. Phrases like World Aids Day/#WorldAidsDay, HIV, Africa and Red have remained in the top trending topics all day, and hundreds are retweeting @joinred’s and @ONECampaign’s tweets detailing facts and statistics on AIDS and World AIDS Day.

While we’re all used to search engine Google consistently changing its masthead, this is the first time that Twitter has done such an overhaul. Response has been interesting and, in my opinion, overwhelming. As trending topics on Twitter tend to be as fleeting as the wind, it’s quite the feat to maintain consistency throughout an entire day.

While World AIDS Day is well known, this campaign shows how great Twitter is when an organization or business is relying on a word-of-mouth campaign. That retweet button is a powerful tool – in one simple click, your message suddenly gets broadcast to hundreds, thousands, millions. When you have a message but are stuck with a limited budget (or are looking for a unique way to get out that message), it can pay to think outside of traditional marketing. After all, a tweet is only 140 characters. If you put your message out there and it doesn’t get picked up, it’s not hurting anything. You go about your day and try something else.

But if it does get picked up, you’ve hit marketing gold (or red, out of respect for World AIDS Day.)