Tips for running Twitter contests
Twitter contests can offer numerous benefits including increased exposure through tweets and retweets (viral), and demonstrating a fun side of your brand (ex. scavenger hunts, uniquely interactive contests.)
Designing an effective Twitter contest is not without its challenges. Consider this: If you’re running a “1st person to answer” type of contest, how will you judge when the tweets actually arrived, by timestamp? How will you track responses and pick a winner?Perhaps the most important element of a Twitter contest is the phrase used for the contest tweet. It needs to be short enough to RT, include a URL, plus include convincing marketing language to entice people to click and enter.
Another element of a successful Twitter contest is being able to keep people interested. Consider running the contest for only a few days to avoid losing momentum (longer if you don’t have a large base of followers to tap into.)
Limit entries or not? Colorburned recommends this, but Heather DePiano wisely points out: “…the more often they tweet your link, the more marketing power it gives you.”
Three important things to remember when running a Twitter contest are to 1) pick a prize that’s highly desirable, 2) establish clear contest rules, and 3) keep it simple!
Twitter Contest Tools:
- Tweetaways.com is a service that picks a random winner for your next twitter contest or giveaway.
- itweet2win is a permission based contest platform based on twitter APIs.
- retweetradar finds trends in the mountains of information retweeted on Twitter.
- Tweets Win, enables you to post a contest, gather statistics, and have the winner automatically chosen.
- search.twitter.com is the old skool tool for manually tracking contest responses.
Read more about running Twitter contests:
