PayPal is Trending for all the right reasons

You can buy yourself a Trendy Topic on Twitter, but is that worth more than a topic that has organically worked its way into the current top phase? Many films including Saw, Hangover and Paranormal Activity 2 have recently purchased a Trendy Topic to get straight to the top of the chart. PayPal went a different route – by offering to donate 5 cents for every person who Tweets #beatcancer.

Livestrong announced last week that it’s attempting to beat its own world record for “Most Widespread Social Networking Message”. The record was set last year with over 200,000 unique mentions of #beatcancer in 24 hour.

This raised more than $70,000 through donations and PayPal sponsoring 1 cent for each mention. This year it gave five times that per mention in order to help out the cause.

The company prepared its websites (beatcancereverywhere.com, standuptocancer.org and brightpink.org) for large amounts of additional traffic and donations.

This isn’t a completely selfless deed on the part of PayPal. People Tweeting a similar message over and over again as well as the hashtag made the phrase PayPal enter and hold the Trendy Topics highest position for a large portion of today.

The message being “PayPal will donate $0.05 for every Tweet that contains #beatcancer, post yours now.”

This free advertising is great for the company as it shows its more charitable side.

PayPal is owned by eBay who are promoting its services for Christmas shoppers and bargain outlet customers in the following two months.

I’ll be looking forward to the official results, coming out later this week, showing if Livestrong has beaten its own records – personally I don’t mind if they don’t beat the number of Tweets produced last year as they already are in the Guinness Book of World Records, but I do care if they have raised more money. And yes, I did donate and Tweet, five times as much as I did last year.