Twitter competitions to grow your followers

June 20, 2012 by 7 Comments

Damn it I love Twitter, and I recently had the pleasure of engaging with one of my favorite local businesses (Moddershall Oaks Spa Staffordshire) who were looking for idea’s to quickly grow their Twitter account with relevant and targeted followers. (That’s right, I dropped them an anchor text link, what of it?)

I have to admit these guys already do a great job with their social media efforts anyway so I was delighted that they listened to my ideas and that they achieved the results they wanted in UNDER 24 hours. Here a few of the idea’s that helped them do it.

(and they did most of them without me even mentioning it – Muchos Kudos)

Select a great prize

The very first thing to do when launching any kind of competition is to ensure that you have a prize worthy of your efforts, it’s crucial your potential success. When I say great, please don’t read that as expensive because it doesn’t have to be, some of the best prizes I have offered up have literally cost me just a few pounds. Things such are cash, ipod’s and discounts in my opinion should be avoided. Although they appeal to a wide audience they are pretty boring and are not targeted to any particular niche.

What makes a great prizes?

  • Highly relevant to the people you’re targeting
  • Something which isn’t generally for sale (behind the scenes access for example)
  • Personalized prize
  • Something fun

Have a competition page

Because Twitter is limited to 140 characters it’s vital that you have more information on the competition back over at your website or blog. This is where you can give more detail on things like terms and conditions, rules of entry, deadlines. It’s also an opportunity to add photographs of your AMAZING prize if applicable and to insert any call’s to action you may need. It’s worth noting that you don’t necessarily need to create a totally new page for this, if you are an ecommerce store giving away one of your products you could add the competition detail directly to the product page.

Link to the competition page

If you do create a page holding more details about your competition (and you should!) then make sure you link to it in your tweets. Firstly this ensures that people can easily access the terms but it’s also an opportunity to route them back to your website. Secondly any retweets of the competition will all be linking back to your site, giving search engines important social signals.

KISS

Complicated entrance rules or competition terms will instantly turn people off, it’s really important to keep everything as simple as possible. Don’t make them think! Keep it simple stoopid.

Keep it short

When tweeting about your competition make sure you keep the tweet length to a minimum. Shorter tweets are more likely to be retweeted, longer one’s may be edited or require a “tweet longer” type service, both are things we want to avoid.

Leverage your brand advocates

A brand advocate is somebody (generally a customer) who talks favorably about your brand, your “fan boys” (and girls!) These guys can really help to spread the word about your competition and if they don’t do it automatically give them a nudge. Don’t have any advocates yet? It doesn’t matter, just read as “friends”, “family”, “colleagues”, “pet” (ok, maybe not pet). It’s not a crime to drop them a note to say, “Hey, we’re running this competition with an amazing prize, it’d be cool if you entered and spread the word for us.” Most times, if they truly are advocates, they will.

Ways to enter

If the goal is to attract more followers then the extremely obvious way to enter is simply 1 follow = 1 entry. Great, but how are the people who don’t follow you going to find out they need to, in order to enter the competition? Offering a retweet entry in addition to a follow ensures that your current followers are not excluded and help spread the message.

Multiple Tweets

It’s not enough to simply throw up a tweet and hope that people are looking, in order to increase the viability of your competition (and the chances of it succeeding)  you need to mention it a few times. There are no magic formula as to how many times you should do this (although plenty of bloggers would disagree) but generally speaking mixing up different times of day and different styles of tweets is a really good way of seeing what works in your niche. Once you’ve run a few competitions you should be getting a feel for the best times of day and the right tweet style to get your targets hooked.

Pro Tip: If you think you’re tweeting it too much, you probably are.

There you have it, a few (hopefully) great tips for running a Twitter competition to grow your following. I’m sure there are plenty more and hope you guys will share your tips in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

Post by Gaz Copeland
Filed Under: Social Media

Comments

  1. Julie Joyce says:
    June 27, 2012 at 5:45 pm

    So you made suggestions that people followed and they worked? Isn’t that truly a great feeling? Nice job sir.

    Reply
    • Gaz Copeland says:
      June 27, 2012 at 8:20 pm

      In all honesty I only suggested a handful of the above, these guys pretty much rock social anyway so I didn’t have to do that much. I tell you what is great? Businesses that “Get it”!

      Reply
  2. Michael Kovis says:
    June 27, 2012 at 6:04 pm

    Give away free iPads. :-)

    Sky is the limit when creating competitions on Twitter. How you go about, well, I think Gaz has really given some solid advice to make sure it is successful.

    Sorry it took like 24 hours to read this! Haha. Didn’t catch up on anything last night. Besides that, about time you posted something.

    Reply
  3. Glenn says:
    October 10, 2012 at 10:38 am

    Hi,
    This is great, but I find that the followers you get through twitter competitions is mainly fake accounts set-up by people to just enter competitions. I’m not sure of the worth of these followers, is there any SEO worth or are they dead wood? All that said, we’ve noticed our Klout rating rise considerably (not that I have much faith in their algorithm).
    Cheers

    Reply
    • Gaz Copeland says:
      October 11, 2012 at 7:16 pm

      Thanks Glenn. You’re right there are many accounts floating about doing nothing other than entering competitions. You can of course exclude such accounts from winning the prize in your terms, encouraging people to use “real” twitter handles. I honestly don’t pay any attention to Klout or similar, this is all about brand awareness, increasing your social following and interacting with your community

      Reply

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  1. 21 Useful Social Media Resources for SEO’s says:
    October 22, 2012 at 1:06 am

    [...] Twitter Competitions to Grow your followers  - Gaz Copeland gives you a a full run down on how to use a Twitter competiton to increase the followers on your account. [...]

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