Neiman Marcus launched a sweepstakes to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Christian Louboutin shoes, leveraging the viral, visual combo of Twitter and Instagram to create a first-of-its-kind viral promotion that is a case study in using fan-favorite social platforms to engage an audience. The Votigo-powered cross-platform promotion collects user-generated photos through March 10 and displays them on the Neiman Marcus blog and Facebook page.

Three important takeaways if you plan to run a visually-charged Twitter sweepstakes:

It is important to know your audience. Make sure your followers have a passion for photography (often using their mobile camera) and a willingness to share their art via Twitter. Instagram has a natural alignment with consumer brands – from retailers to luxury goods to labels. (Wrote@nickwestergaard in January, “Fashion and beauty brands with obvious visual appeal have planted flags here as well, such as Burberry and Aveda.”)

Accommodate all users. While Instagram carries a certain prestige among photo sharing apps among iPhone-carrying Twitter users, others- especially Yfrog, TwitPic and Twitter’s own pic.Twitter- also each capture a huge share of Twitter photo posts. So a photo-driven Twitter sweeps must accommodate each of these- as Neiman Marcus’ does.

A Unique Call To Action. In order capture and qualify the virally-driven flood of entries that a well-designed promotion (with a perfectly fitting prize) should deliver, make sure to require unique attributes in the original tweet. The Neiman Marcus sweeps requires the entrant to use both brands’ Twitter handles (@NeimanMarcus and @LouboutinWorld) as well as the unique hashtag #NMLoubiLove – which also makes it easy to check out all the action on Twitter.

Contact the Votigo team to find out more about running a photo-driven Twitter sweepstakes.

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