Something very interesting happened this past week, July 21 on Twitter on the pages 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.

The coupon plan was simple and Starbucks required that you had to show a coupon in order to receive the pastry. Displaying the fact that the consumers are tech savvy, you could either print out the coupon or show the coupon on your phone.  This is easily done with many of the Twitter Pic Applications that are available.

The promotion being ran from opening until 10:30 am, Starbucks #FreePastryDay is a perfect example of how powerful a medium Twitter is. In review of the stats for the first 24 hours the final statistics were amazingly successful.

During this 24 hour blast, Starbucks went from being the #4 Trending Topic on Twitter to #2 now they are #12.  This first 24 hour period resulted in over 44,000 Tweets that included the word Starbucks.

Some stores reported outages of pastries and I think many consumers were surprised that so many took part.  I personally went to two locations and they stated that the flow had been steady and more than any promotion they have had outside the holiday period.

There was also a wave effect with the coupon since Twitter is a social community the RT and pass around was very powerful for them as well.  Just another way to show the real power of social media.   For those that need to see 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.  Most probably purchased their normal beverage, I had no plans to visit Bucks that day but the Twitter Coupon did it for me, I can only imagine the power of bringing in new customers if this were applied to other restaurants.

The key here is that you must remember all you need to reach on twitter or any social network for that matter is the top 10%, the influential.  They drive the interest and the buying signals from there.   #FreePastryDay is a Twitter success and a good example of how social media marketing can increase your ROI.