• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 4, 2009

Ivanka Trump reached a quarter of a million followers on Twitter in less than three months during a promotion for her latest venture (of course, during this period she also had a highly publicized engagement to New York Observer publisher and fellow real-estate royal Jared Kushner going for her). Halogen Network created a microsite and Twitter campaign for the Donald Trump-scion to promote her Trump SoHo, a luxury hotel scheduled to open in February. The campaign began in July, two weeks after Ivanka's first tweet.

Tweets from Ivanka's Twitter feed appear on the microsite, which counts down the opening of the New York City hotel. Along with other mentions related to the hotel, the feed integrates into ads running across the Halogen publisher network that includes The Business Insider, The Daily Beast, Snooth.com and Food52.com.

Halogen created an application that filters tweets to the microsite and into ads running across its publishing network. "We built an application that sits on top of the Twitter API," says Halogen Founder and CEO Greg Shove. "It's all about the notion of taking tweets out of Twitter and feeding them into other types of media."

The application that sits on the Twitter API, which Shove calls "brand love," streams real-time customer testimonials. Marketers for the brand don't need to tweet, but instead let consumers market for the brand. The application plucks the positive tweets from Tweeter streams to republish them on Web sites or ad units running across the Web.

Shove says that Trump, executive vice president of development and acquisitions for Trump Hotel Collection, has become the first person from a luxury brand to reach a quarter of a million followers in less than three months. In fact, she has managed to attract about 425,652 followers who read about everything from personal wedding plans to a promotion for a VIP weekend getaway at Trump SoHo.

Visitors to Trump's microsite can explore the hotel, book rooms and enter to win a VIP Weekend Getaway at Trump SoHo. Twelve winners will get a two-night stay at the hotel, dinner for two at Quattro and a VIP invitation to join Ivanka at a private reception to toast the opening.

Shove believes the Twitter campaign has built a following because it reaches the correct demographic, but it's not clear whether followers of the New York socialite can afford to lay out the cash for the hefty price tag that a one-night stay at the luxury hotel will command.

A study released by Pew Internet Projects reveals that people who have household incomes less than $29,999 are more likely to tweet or update their social status. The study also suggests that 22% of people with combined household incomes of less than $29,999 tweet, compared with 21% of household incomes of $30,000 to $49,999; at 20%, $50,000 to $74,999; and 20%, $75,000 or more.

Paul Verna, eMarketer analyst, who also points to data from Anderson Analytics, believes that enough people who generate a yearly income of $75,000-plus tweet often enough on Twitter to justify using the service to promote a high-end hotel. However, he does point to the fact that Pew lumps together all respondents who make $75,000 and up, while Anderson Analytics segments the more affluent respondents by income level. The wealthier the person, the less likely he or she is to use Twitter, he says.

Users who visited Twitter.com with incomes of $100,000 or more increased 55% from the prior year, according to Hitwise. Users with incomes between $30,000 and $59,000 comprise the majority of visits to the site for the four weeks ending Oct. 31, the research firm says. The numbers do not include visits from third-party applications and devices.