If you haven’t already realized the power of social media to reach large audiences in a short amount of time, I have a great example to convince you.
Yesterday I was reading through some of my favorite blogs and came across a story on Mashable about eBay/PayPal & Miller Lite raising money for cancer research – a cause close to my heart after losing my dad to cancer last year. Of course I had to find out more, so I went to http://beatcancereverywhere.com and learned that a $0.01 donation would be made to cancer research for every mention of the #beatcancer hashtag in a blog post, Facebook update or Twitter tweet in a 24-hour period. In addition to raising money for cancer, they were trying to set a Guinness World Record for social media mentions.
Now I could care less about breaking records, but I do believe that every penny counts when fundraising for a worthy cause. So I did my part – I posted it on Facebook and tweeted about it. Some of my followers re-tweeted and the word continued to spread throughout the night.
beatcancereverywhere.com has a counter on their website and at the time of my first tweet, they were only several hours into the countdown and already had over 5000 mentions. I checked and re-tweeted three hours later, finding the count at over 81,000 mentions. The next morning the count was over 200,000. And by the end of the 24-hour period, 208,424 people had used the #beatcancer hashtag in social media.
They had reached 208,424 people in just 24 hours.
Can anyone ever doubt the reach of social media again?
If you have remarkable ideas to share or a worthy cause to fight for, you too can reach out to the world with social media.
Feel the Power.