This post is more of a story than anything else, but I just think the whole thing is interesting. So a few weeks ago I was working with one of my buddies when we all of the sudden came across the topic of Fortnite. For those that don't know, Fortnite is a third person shooter game that millions of people all around the world play online with each other. Fortnite is a free game that makes all of their money off of extra content such as different costumes or different weapon camouflages. So my buddy told me that the day previous, he went into GameStop and picked up a special Fortnite card that gave him one of these camouflages for free and that it was pretty cool. He didn't know why it was important, but when he went in the store and asked for the card, they told him he could take as many as he wanted. He took six cards and went on with his day thinking absolutely nothing of it.
Later that night he was watching YouTube when one of his favorite influencers mentioned the cards and how they could only be retrieved in the United States. He immediately realized that he had some extra cards and direct messaged this YouTuber asking if he would like one of the cards. The YouTuber of course said yes and gave him a shoutout the next day. Within hours my friend's Twitter account was up around 600 followers more than it was previously and that's when I got the idea.
I told my friend to get in the car with me and go to all of the GameStops in our area to try to get as many cards as we could. After going to all four GameStop locations two times a piece we began on the next step of this process. With the minor fame that my friend had accumulated, he shouted me out holding 10-15 of the cards we had recently accumulated in the mall. Followers immediately started flowing in because Fortnite fans from other countries wanted these cards.
After we got back to my house we started talking about how we could gain more followers. Instantly the thought came in our head that we should do giveaways. The cards were free, so it didn't cost us anything but time to put these up on our account. But we needed more followers to make it worth our time. I instant messaged a few extremely famous gaming accounts that I knew were based in the UK asking if they wanted to do a joint giveaway. I got traction with an account with 10,000 followers and an account with 350,000 followers. They both shouted me out on their Twitter and that's when the followers really started to come in.
By the end of that night I was up almost 2,500 followers and my messages were filled with over 700 kids asking me if I could provide them with a code or do another giveaway. When I woke up the next morning my followers had continued to climb over the night and I was nearing 4,500 followers. I continued doing the same things and trying to giveaway as many codes as I could to those who lived in other countries. When it was all said and done and I had ran out of codes, I was up just under 5,000 followers from where I had started and had a ton of fun doing it. However... I still have over 1,000 messages that I haven't read yet and probably never will.