Running Effective Twitter Contests To Increase Followers

**Update** I have just created a new FREE 10 Lesson E-mail course to teach you how to create a Twitter Contest. You can read more about the course and sign sign up for it by visiting the description page now.

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Contest are a very popular way of gaining subscribers. In Twitter, followers are the equivalent of subscribers. In this post, I want to discuss how to perform a successful Twitter contest. This is something that I did which primed my Twitter followers base with targeted followers. Once you gain a threshold of followers, your list can continue to grow on its own, as long as you put out good, relevant, and useful tweets.

Here are some things to keep in mind when you decide to start a Twitter contest:

1. Know your purpose for the contest- Are you trying to sell a product, service or book? Are you trying to add subscribers to a list other than Twitter? Are you trying to build your subscriber followers? In my opinion, you will achieve the most success with your Twitter contest if you focus on building your Twitter followers. And not just any followers, but targeted followers. Anyone can get tens of thousands of followers. But which would you rather have? 10,000 followers who never read your tweets or 1,000 followers who actually follow you and your tweets? Give me enough money as a prize and I can inflate your followers significantly. Sure, you want followers; but you want qualified followers more.
   
   
2. Give some thought as to the give-aways- What will be your prize? That is, what will be the carrot you use to get people to enter your contest? An i-pod? a $500 gift certificate to Ruth Chris Steakhouse? A mini-vacation package? These prizes may sound impressive on the surface, but chances are that they will not give you the results you are looking for in your contest. Those types of prizes attract people who are only interested in one thing- the prize. They could care less about you, your book, or your services.
   
   Ideally, you want to find prizes that will attract only the people who are interested in the products and services you offer while being passed on my everyone else. This is where you find your targeted followers that will be the most responsive to you tweets later. When I ran my Twitter contest, I gave away a library of signed book marketing books to the winner. After all, I deal with people who want to learn effective ways to market their books, products or services. If the prize package didn't appeal to someone, I wasn't necessarily looking for them as a follower. But if the person was someone who prayed to win that library, then they were the person I wanted to make sure knew about my blog.
   
   
3. Don't go at it alone- Here is a mistake that many people make when running Twitter contests designed to increase their follower base: they give away a copy of their own book, service, or product. While this may be a great prize to have, it may not do a lot to expand your followers. The people who sign up for your contest will be mainly from your current subscriber lists. While you may have a few people re-tweeting your contests to their follower list, it will probably not be on the scale you are looking for.
   
   In order to find new followers, the details of your contest must be placed in front of new people who are not following you. That means you must find a way to encourage people to re-tweet your contest to their followers. Two ways to do this effectively:
   
   A. Create a prize with enough viral power to make others want to retweet it
   B. Give away a prize created by other people who have a lot of Twitter followers
   
   If you follow those two suggestions, you will have people who will use your contest to promote their own product. This is the way you create a win-win-win situation. If you can give away good, solid publicity to the creators of your prize, they will be more likely to tell their follows about your contest and encourage them to enter.
   
   
4. Choose the right length of time to run your contest- If you run your contest too long, people will lose interest very quickly. They will also not see the urgency of entering now or tweeting about it now. On the other hand, if you make it too short, it will be over before you have time for it to really ramp up and deliver the followers you are looking for. My personal preference is to run a contest for about 10 to 12 days, starting on a weekend and ending after the next weekend. This will give you the best chance to catch the business Tweople as well as the weekend Tweople.
   
   
5. Tweet about it at different times throughout the day- You will have the best chance of having your contest being seen if you send out tweets about it at different times of the day, including midnight, 3:00am, 5:00am, etc. Since people on Twitter have different schedules and live in different timezones, you want to make sure you give everyone a chance to see your contest. A service like TweetLater can help you schedule these tweets to run even when you are sleeping.
   
   
6. Have a plan in place to track your entries- One of the worst things you can do it to launch a great contest only to find a few days in that you forgot to set up a way to track those who are entering. You need to do this for a couple of reasons. First, to make sure everyone has a fair chance to win. Second, to measure how successful your contest campaign was. Tracking can be easy for a Twitter contest. You can have a specific phrase they must tweet to enter. Then, you can go to the Twitter search engine and enter the phrase to pull up all who tweeted that phrase. Ideally, you will want that message to include the prizes, a link for others to enter the contest, and your Twitter link. For example, here is the tweet that people had to send in order to enter to win the autographed marketing library I was giving away:
   
   RT @tonyeldridge Win library of book marketing books personally inscribed to the winner by their authors: http://tinyurl.com/dhf5bs
   
   This made sure that their followers had everything they needed to also enter the contest. Oh, and another important point- make sure that a requirement to enter the contest is to follow you on Twitter. It kind of defeats your purpose if you forget that. Sure, people can un-follow you after the contest. But if you give away something that ties into your platform, then you will not see many unfollows (unless you break some of the cardinal rules of Twitter and drive people away; but that's for another post).
   
   I found a nice, free program that ran my contests well and did all the tracking and communicating for me. It even picked the winner for me when I was done. It's called Twiveaway. In fact, it did such a great job at running the contest on autopilot for me that I can't see me using anything else for future contests, and I am not getting paid a dime for saying that. Check it out if you are serious about running contests.
   
   **NOTE** UPDATE TO ABOVE POINT 8/3/09
   TwiveAway seems to be experiencing problems running contests. I contacted their customer support and they said that they are aware of this issue and will be fixing the problem in an update. However, this problems seems to be getting worse and not better. I can not at this time recommend TwiveAway as a tool to use when hosting Twitter contests. It simply is not doing what it is supposed to do.
   
   
7. Communicate your results and run your reports- When the contest is over and you have picked a winner, you need to have a method in place of contacting the winning and then announcing the winner to your contestants (make sure you don't give away too much personal info about the winner-- and no contact info! Usually, a name and perhaps a city/state will do). Then, you will want to look over the reports to see how many new followers you gained, and factor in the costs, if any, you incurred to see how much you spent to acquire these followers. This will help you to better determine the success of your contest the next time you run one.
   

Good luck on running your next contest. I hope you find all the success you are looking for. Remember, treat your contestants right and you will be in for a fun, rewarding contest.

Tony Eldridge