Touchnote, which offers an app that enables consumers to take a photo and send it as a physical postcard, has been forced to update its Olympic-themed promotion due to unprecedented demand.

As a special offer for the Olympics, it partnered with Samsung to run a special offer via the web and for customers with Android smartphones. Postcards could be sent completely free until 31st August 2012 with Samsung’s Olympic sponsorship message on the card.

However, Touchnote ended up closing the promotion two weeks early after unexpectedly high demand saw it burn through the entire free postcards budget in just 3 weeks, sending over $1,000,000 of postcards. As an alternative it’s now running a separate promotion until 9th September via Facebook.

Raam Thakrar, Touchnote’s co-founder, said “The Samsung-sponsorship was a great success. We’ve had over 750,000 orders so far, from almost every country that competed in the Olympic games. What’s been great is seeing the consumer reaction to this - people reengaging with postcards in a way that they weren’t expecting. Our favourite anecdote was about a family who sent lots of postcards to their great-grandmother - a 91 year old woman, who was absolutely over-the-moon as it was these photo postcards that were helping her re-ignite her memories.”

“For the remainder of the Olympic events (i.e. until the Paralympics end on September 9th) Samsung decided to focus on the Facebook app only - this gives a different level of socialness to your sending. We launched a world-first: our app lets you send a photo to any of your Facebook friends, even if you don’t know their address. Just a couple of weeks after launching it, we’re already the largest postcards app on Facebook - over 60,000 monthly users now.”

Touchnote launched its postcard service in 2009, enabling customers with iPhones and Android devices to send postcards anywhere in the world for £1.49 each.