What Is A Twitter Contest And Why Should I Run One?

Twitter contests and competitions are only gaining in popularity. But what is a Twitter competition, and how should you set one up? This post is a quick run-through of the basics involved.

I’ll start by answering the first question: what is a Twitter contest? The basic idea is simple: you offer a prize to give away to a lucky winner (or winners!), but rather than people entering by buying something, sending a text message from their phone or filling out a form online, your entrants will come from people tweeting on Twitter.

So, you have a prize available and know how long you want your contest to run for. After that, the only question remaining is what you would like people to tweet in order to enter.

You have many choices, but I recommend sticking with one of two options: you want entrants to answer a question; or you want people to promote your brand and/or a link. In the first instance, you can ask something like “Tell us why cows are great, mentioning @our_twitter_account in your message.” In the second instance, you can request that people tweet a piece of text in its entirety, such as “Win a great prize from our_brand, cows are great: http://example.com via @our_twitter_account.” The advantage of this latter approach is that you can add a “Tweet” button to your website with the text already set, meaning that people only have to click a couple of buttons in order to send out your message.

Note that in both of these messages, I’ve included “@our_twitter_account.” The “@” is deliberate. When typed like this into Twitter, this will give two benefits: each tweet will be directly linked to your Twitter account; and when you search for entries, Twitter will return each and every result; something that isn’t true if you rely on a phrase, or a #hashtag instead.

Currently I am running a contest for food processing sanitation chemicals.  I’ll let you know the results.

Now that I’ve covered the “how,” what about the “why?”

First of all, Twitter contests are a fantastic way to grow and promote your brand. When someone tweets out your competition text, all their followers can see that they’ve done so, many of whom will take a brief look, and possibly enter themselves. If your competition requires tweeting a link, this is a great way to promote it, and will result in many new visitors to your website.

You also get to directly engage with your brand’s audience in a 100% positive manner. It’s both easy and common for people to strike up a brief chat on Twitter with you about your competition, and this can turn people into life-long fans of your brand.

So, you’ve managed to create a great feeling about your brand, gain exposure amongst people who might not have been aware of it before, and brought new visitors to your website. That sounds pretty successful to me!

Thomas Buck recently founded Interactwive, a tool for running contests on Twitter. He is British, a terrible pianist, and lives in Warsaw, Poland.

Tagged as: Twitter, Twitter Contest, What Is Twitter Contest