Tweet for Charity

Some pretty fun Twitter memes have popped up lately – most notably the #nerdpickuplines meme.  #nerdpickuplines was a blast for the nerd community, and even earned itself an article in the L.A. Times.  Yesterday a less noticed Twitter meme came to my attention.  Edufire, an online video learning company, decided to have some fun with Twitter while raising money and awareness for the charity Room to Read.  How they went about this was pretty cool.

Edufire posted a tweet that stated for every time the message was re-tweeted, they would donate $1 to Room to Read.  To keep track of the message, they placed the #edufire hashtag in the tweet.  Within an hour and a half, the the message had been re-tweeted almost 200 times.  Pretty impressive for such a short period of time.

Now 200 may not sound like a whole lot, but when you think of how many people are in each person’s network that retweet the message, that is a LOT of impressions.  To toss some numbers around, if each person to retweet the message had 50 unique followers, you are talking about 10,000 impressions.

So while only $200 was donated to Room for Reading, potentially tens of thousands of people found out about the charity.

Not too shabby for an hour and a half.