In an effort to promote Wendy’s new Applewood Smoked Bacon sandwich, the fast food chain is incorporating a social media campaign centered on a Twitter contest into its site Wendy’s Real Time.

Wendy’s Real Time collects updates to Twitter, Facebook and Flickr related to things like hunger, burgers and now the online love affair with bacon. “We’re trying to give people something to talk about and have fun,” said Myles Kleeger, managing director at The Kaplan Thaler Group, the Wendy’s agency behind the campaign. “The beauty of this strategy is it’s creating more content for us for this hub.”

The contest, called The Bacon Hunt launched early this past week and gives points and tracks scores of Twitter users that are following @UrBaconMeCrazy and performing different tasks. For example, participants could earn points for updating their status about bacon or for knowing how many slices of bacon are on the new burger. Entrants to the contest are required to use the hashtag #bacon in all of their tweets.

Participants’ entries and updates will automatically feed into the company’s Facebook page which carries a running stream of bacon tweets, a scoreboard of the contest’s point leaders, as well visitors can give friends “the gift of bacon” by sending virtual Wendy’s sandwiches.

“We noticed there was a lot of pent up demand,” said Kleeger. “People really like the Wendy’s brand, but they weren’t talking about it enough. We’re giving people things to talk about.”

The Bacon Hunt contest will run for “12 days of bacon” and will award the top scorer $2000 when it ends on November 20.