Toyota is offering its customers $500 for tweeting about a recent purchase, in order to build anticipation for its annual sales event.

In order to qualify, customers need to visit the Toyota Shareathon site and then send the following tweet: "If I get my new Toyota during Toyotathon they'll give me $500 just for this Tweet. http://buyatoyota.com @Toyota #shareathon."

Once the customer purchases a Toyota vehicle, they can visit that page and redeem their $500 debit card.

Kimberley Gardiner, Toyota's national digital marketing and social media manager, told Mashable the idea is to build a sense of anticipation ahead of its sales.

"We wanted to leverage social media to build incremental awareness of our annual Toyotathon sales event. We feel that $500 is a significant enough offer to stimulate consumer interest and generate strong buzz throughout the social space."

"Tweets and other Social Media efforts help us create velocity behind an immediate call to action for consumers to take advantage of a program like this with limited duration."

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If you would like 50,000 twitters folowing your dealership contact me!