• December 12, 2011

Toyota is once again doing its year-end promotion, Shareathon. The social promotion adds a $1,000 incentive for sharing the campaign via Twitter.

The program rewards shoppers who register online and tweet about their plans to purchase or lease a new Toyota during Toyota's year-end Toyotathon close-out promo, with a $500 prepaid debit card.  

This time, as a bonus, Toyota will add $50 on to the debit card for each re-tweet of the shopper's original message within 48 hours (up to a total of $1,000) and participants who retweet will be entered to win a new 2011 Prius.

Beginning today, the first 140 people to register and tweet--starting at 11 a.m. EST each day of the program--will be eligible for certificates that will be redeemable for the prepaid debit card.

From Dec. 12 through Dec. 21, shoppers who register online at www.toyota.com/shareathon, tweet a scripted Shareathon message, and then purchase or lease a new Toyota vehicle on or before Jan. 3, 2012 will be eligible for a certificate and unique coupon code redeemable for a $500 prepaid debit card. Participants will then have 48 hours to encourage their followers to retweet the initial message. As an added bonus, those followers who retweet the message will be entered to win a 2011 Prius from Toyota. 

The company says the Shareathon site will also generate "interactive visualizations" that track the original tweets and retweets. The visualizations use circular graphs where each point represents a retweet, with color-coding to distinguish original retweets from second- and third-generation retweets.