Sit in any discussion about how a charity can promote a campaign on social media and it won't be long before someone suggests asking Stephen Fry to tweet about it.

Being very kind, intelligent and rather lovely, he is known to tweet on behalf of a wide range of non-profit organisations. And with over 6.5 million followers, he can drive some serious traffic to a website.

So what does happen when Stephen mentions a campaign or a cause in a tweet?

Stephen mentioned wecometogether.org in this tweet on Monday the tenth of February at 5.57pm.

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The site went crazy. Within two minutes we'd had over one thousand hits. And three days later that single tweet is still driving traffic.

From the initial spike the number of hits settled down to about sixty a minute which continued until late in to the night. Here's a screen grab that shows the number of hits over the first hour.

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We are currently standing at well over 21,000 hits and we can't see the flow stopping.

But what about conversions?

And that's the point of this post. Too many people think that social media is a magical panacea for a fledgling campaign. It's not. It can help, but without a great offer, you are never going to be able to generate significant levels of income.

People will come and have a look and then simply click back to see what else is happening on Twitter.

The conversion rate we've seen is comparable to a good press insert in a good publication.

That's very pleasing. The danger of our approach was that people might just come and have a look at the TV ad and then disappear. That's not the case. People are looking and sharing. But, most importantly, we are generating donations.

Our goal now is to see what worked for this test and what didn't and develop the product from there.
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