Viral marketing for movies has been apart of our consciousness dating back to The Blair Witch Project. From there, we’ve seen successful ventures from The Dark Knight and Cloverfield, to name a few. Now, Paramount has turned to Twitter for their marketing push for Paranormal Activity 3, a prequel that attempts to shed some light on the history of the family being tormented by a malevolent spirit/demon from the first two installments.
The third part of the series is scheduled for an October 21st release, and to help spread the word and to stoke interest, Paramount — the studio backing the Paranormal Activity series — is turning to Twitter to promote the movie via their “Tweet To See It First” campaign. The concept is simple. Twitter users can pick the city closet to them, tweet about it, and the top 20 cities, which is calculated which ones have the most tweets, will be shown the movie three days before the movie opens for the rest of the world.
Over at the Paranormal Activity 3 website, users can select the city closet to them, which they then tweet about. These posts act as a vote, of which, the site keeps a real-time leader board that displays the cities that are currently winning.
The tweets in question look like the following:
@WebProNews
WebProNewsTweet to see it First! Bring Paranormal Activity 3 to your city early. #ParanormalActivity #Lexington Vote: http://t.co/PJhbyxuE
43 seconds ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto
Unfortunately, that tweet represents the first one from the WebProNews area, so it’s doubtful Lexington, Kentucky will be one of the lucky 20 to get the early premiere. To help kick the “Tweet Your Scream” event off, Paramount released the second trailer for PA3, which doesn’t look too bad at all:
Over at the site, the top 5 cities in the contest include Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, Dallas, and Istanbul. Because the contest is open on a worldwide basis, there are a number of foreign cities on the list, including the aforementioned Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Curitiba, Sheffield, Buenos Aries and Caracas. Clearly, the franchise has worldwide appeal, and, not to mention, savvy Twitter users outside of the United States.
If you’re interested in joining in the fun, you’ll need a few friends with Twitter accounts in the local area of choice. Simply navigate to the Paranormal Activity 3 site, pick your city — or the one closet to you — and get to tweeting. The contest ends on October 13th, at 11:59 PST. You can follow the official PA3 Twitter account, as well, @TweetYourScream.
