Back in May we told you about the Marriott Rewards Plus program which gives you Marriott points for performing social network items. To begin with they were giving you 250 points just for following their different properties on Twitter, it turns out that this was way to easy so they massively devalued the program in July so that you only earned 25 points. I decided that this was way to much hassle and stopped paying attention to the program.
At the back of my mind has been the thought that there must be a simple way to automate this promotion and score 2,000 free Marriott points easily. I finally found some free time and found a method that was relatively easy and quick, I’ll share that below. You’ll need three things to get started:
- Twitter account, this should be an account you don’t mind sending marketing messages from. I’d recommend creating a brand new account for this type of purpose so you don’t annoy those who follow you.
- Marriott account
- Simplycast account (this is completely free for our purposes)
Now onto the circle and arrow post.
- Update: Before you link your twitter account, you’ll need to link your facebook account. Make sure your facebook account has at least a few friends to make it “activate” otherwise you might encounter errors.
- Go to https://www.marriottrewardspluspoints.com/ and link your Marriott account number with your twitter account. If you’ve already linked a twitter account that you don’t want to spam, don’t worry you can unlink and relink a new account instead.
- Log into your simplycast account
- Click new project (on the left hand side) then twitter
- Give your project a name in left hand corner (e.g Marriott Promo)
- You will then need to add three different tweets, each tweet must contain the #MRpoints and one of the following three: #autographhotels, #renhotels or #LoveMarriottRewards. For example you could add the following three tweets. Update: You also need to click the gear icon change the repeat interval to fixed and to 1 day. You’ll need to do this for each of the three tweets, sorry for not including this originally :
- #LoveMarriottRewards and #MRpoints are the best!
- I wish I could stay at #autographhotels maybe with my #MRpoints
- #renhotels look beautiful, if only I had more #MRpoints
- Click next once your page looks similar to belowÂ
- On the project settings page (which will appear after hitting next in step 6), pick the end date you want to stop posting on. I just randomly selected some time in 2015, even though the promotion is due to die on the 8th of November, 2014.
- Click add account on the project settings page and authorize SimplyCast to use your twitter account (also make sure this is the same account you linked in step one.
- Click next
- Click complete project, if there are any errors with your project (e.g if you didn’t link your twitter account on the projects setting page) it will not let you save the project.
- Check to ensure your tweets are posting and your points are posting
Obviously this is not what Marriott hand in mind for this promotion and they might not be to happy with people doing this. I wouldn’t recommend doing this if you have a lot of Marriott points in your account or loosing your account would be a big deal. That said for people with no loyalty to Marriott that want to earn some free points this might be a good opportunity. Twitter probably isn’t a fan of this either, so don’t use a twitter account you care about.
The promotion ends on November 8th so you should still be able to rack up close to 4,000 points between now and then. Hopefully Marriott decide to extend the promotion. I’ve been doing this for a week or two without any issue as of yet, I’ll update this post if I encounter any issues.
P.S the reason I used simplycast is that it has the only tweet scheduling that works for repeated tweets. If you know of something else that works let me know and feel free to use it, I don’t have any affiliation with any of the programs mentioned in this post.
Is this deal still alive in 2015?
Nope, it’s dead now unfortunately.
I haven’t seen points credit since 10/5. Anyone else having issues?
I received points today and yesterday without issue, are your tweets still going out?
Thanks! Has been working great!
Glad to hear it.
simplycast doesn’t seem to be free! It asks me to subscribe.
Which plan should I get?
Thanks
I did it, and the tweets did not go out after the first day. The step that is missing from above is that when you are composing the tweets (step 6), you hit the gear icon under each one and set it to repeat every day. I found that the only way to do this was to delete the project and start again from scratch
Thank you, I got it working first and then recreated the steps later, but I obviously messed up. Apology post incoming.
Where do I check any increase in points? Marriott rewards.com?
You can just log into your Marriott account like normal.
Do you need to set it to tweet every day? That wasn’t in the instructions.
Step 8
Thanks, I did set the end date for next year, but it now says the status of the project is “complete”. Do you have to specifically check something to make it tweet every day?
What do you value Marriott points at? To ask the same question in a different way, how many dollars/month is this worth to you?
Not a lot, maybe half a cent each so $10. I’ll take it though!
IFTTT works as well for scheduling tweets.
Heard as much, never bothered to try because simplycast worked so well for my purposes.
Sweet! Great for the opportunistic points collector.