Demi Lovato used Twitter in one of the most creative ways I’ve ever seen in order to promote her new single, “Heart Attack,” and its accompanying lyric video last Friday. Her twitter promotion built anticipation for the lyric video, was interactive and engaging for fans, and had all of her fans tweeting the words to “Heart Attack.” On Friday morning she tweeted:
Think you guys can unlock the lyric video for “Heart Attack”?! #UnlockHeartAttack demilovato.com
— demetria lovato (@ddlovato) March 1, 2013
This interesting promotion not only had fans tweeting her lyrics with the hashtag #UnlockHeartAttack, but also encouraged them to purchase her single. Surely fans everywhere downloaded the single so they could hear all of the words to tweet them out. Once you closed the pop-up the site looked like this:
The site showed which words were already unlocked, how many words still needed to be unlocked, and fans had to listen to the song in order to figure out which words were missing. The site also made it easy to participate by including a link to start tweeting straight from the site.
In less than two hours, #UnlockHeartAttack was trending worldwide, showing just how popular this promotion was among fans.
However, as creative as this promotion seems, there were some drawbacks. For starters, since the site for unlockheartattack kept a running tally of how many mentions were left until a word was unlocked, fans figured out how to game the system and started spam tweeting words that needed more mentions.
Since fans started spam tweeting the words in order to unlock them faster, anyone who didn’t already know what the hashtag meant was probably pretty confused when they clicked on it and saw a stream of words taken completely out of context. Whereas tweeting a line or two from the song with the hashtag would just look like people quoting the lyrics, these tweets are essentially non-comprehensible to anyone who doesn’t know about the promotion. Like so:
The other drawback to this promotion was that after 2 hours of frantically tweeting to unlock the video, fans started getting pretty frustrated. Many started wondering if they’ll have to work even harder for the official music video, and others wondered if they even wanted to see the lyric video anymore.
its been more than 2 hours already :’( ..can we just have the lyric video of Heart Attack already by now please? @hollywoodrecs @ddlovato
— pinkjuney @ junebug (@demigoogle) March 1, 2013
we know the lyrics y’all. please unlock the video now. #UnlockHeartAttack @ddlovato @chachi @hollywoodrecs twitter.com/demetriaslayss…
— ? (@demetriaslayss) March 1, 2013
TBH We’ve tweeted the Lyrics that many times,We dont even need the Lyrics Video now… #UnlockHeartAttack But Im not saying I don’t Want it.
— Courtney L.E (@PlanetLovatics) March 1, 2013
Notice how this prompt on the site and the hashtags in the video allowed Demi to transition the hashtag from #UnlockHeartAttack to #HeartAttack. This just shows how the social media team running this promotion carefully considered, controlled, and leveraged hashtags.
Featuring all of her fans’ Twitter trends in a lyric video was an awesome way to thank her fans not only for the hard work they put in during the 2+ hours trying to unlock the video, but also for all of the promoting they did for her throughout the past year. Needless to say, any fans that were frustrated with the unlock process were quick to forgive.
aw, i love how they put our trends in the heart attack lyric video.
— ? (@demetriaslayss) March 1, 2013
What do you think about Demi Lovato’s creative use of Twitter hashtags? Is there anything you would have done differently? Have you seen any other creative uses of Twitter? Sound off in the comments below!
Header image by asterix611.
Article by Jenna Markowski
Jenna has a much easier time writing about the media and pop culture than she does writing about herself. She enjoys the simple things in life, like puns and typography. She is an avid fan of pop-punk, Halo 3, Spider-Man and origami, with a slight Taco Bell obsession. Her spirit animal is either a bulldog or a panda bear. You can also connect with Jenna on Google+ and Twitter.
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