Food and spice brand Zatarain?s teamed up with fast-food chain Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen on a recent mobile social promotion that resulted in 11,265 sweepstakes entries and 63,570 clicks to the sweepstakes landing page.

To promote a limited-edition menu item at Popeyes called Zatarain?s Butterfly Shrimp, the two companies held a contest on Twitter designed to showcase each brand?s roots in New Orleans while leveraging the social fan base of both. Additionally, Zatarain?s kept followers engaged by creating original Vine videos.

?The popularity of mobile video sites such as Vine make it an interesting platform to explore a brand beyond a polished 30-second commercial,? said Jody Towers, management supervisor for Peter Mayer Advertising, New Orleans. ?Leveraging Vine for this promotion allowed us to not only explore the brand, but to tell the story of Zatarain?s Butterfly Shrimp at Popeye?s Louisiana Kitchen.

?The videos were fun and engaging, and being able to view them from your phone allows them to be consumed and shared readily,? she said.

?By using Twitter as the promotional platform we knew we would have a higher mobile reach. We could interact with users tweeting about the Zatarain?s Butterfly Shrimp while they were at Popeye?s encouraging them to enter the contest and share our videos. ?

Zatarain?s agency of record Peter Mayer developed the Tweet Your Way to Mardi Gras contest and Vine videos.

Getting to Mardi Gras
Zatarain?s and Popeyes previously collaborated on bringing a limited-edition menu item to the restaurant?s customers last year. For this year?s repeat performance, the two companies decided to bring the effort to mobile social for the first time.

The ?Tweet Your Way to Mardi Gras? promotion ran for a month this summer with the goal of raising awareness of the return of the popular menu item as well as to connect with Popeyes and Zatarain?s core audience of New Orleans fans.

Twitter was chosen as the platform for the contest because each brand also wanted to grow its fan base on the platform.

The contest encouraged Twitter followers to ?Tweet Your Way to Mardi Gras? by tweeting or re-tweeting using #ZatsAtPopeyes. Tweets sent between June 24 and July 28 were entered to win weekly prize packs and a grand prize trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

Because winners also had to follow @popeyeschicken and @myzatarains on Twitter to win, the contest not only drove sweepstakes entries and clicks but also helped Zatarain?s grow its Twitter follower-base by 50 percent, or 3,286 followers.

On the Vine
Zatarain?s also produced nine videos on Vine that incorporated the butterfly shrimp into interesting scenarios intended to reinforce each brand?s New Orleans positioning.

Vine made sense as the platform for the videos since it is a native Twitter platform. The Vine videos were viewed 920 times over 30 days.

?All promotion was done on social media only and mainly through Twitter,? Ms. Towers said. ?There were a few Facebook crossovers, but Twitter was our main vehicle of promotion for the sweepstakes and videos.

?There was no paid advertisement for the sweepstakes, so the growth was truly organic,? she said.

Final Take
Chantal Tode is associate editor on Mobile Marketer, New York