10 Tips for a Rockin' Twitter Contest

Holding a giveaway or contest on Twitter is a surefire way of generating buzz on the Internet about your site! I took advantage of this during my relaunch event and held two giveaways over the course of a week.

Aside from the predicted traffic increase for a relaunch, I noticed a spike in my feed subscribers and several new unique visitors and commentators who were all referred from one of the retweets promoting my giveaways.

Here are 7 tips to help you get started:

1. Choose prizes that reflect the type of site you're trying to promote.

A common piece of advice for website success is to "find your niche" and stick to it. I like to blog about geeky things, so one of my prizes was a $10 gift certificate to ThinkGeek. Consider the kind of audience you want to attract to your site and offer prizes that they'll be interested in.

Also decide whether you want to offer physical items or digital stuff. Physical prizes are often more fun because people will actually see what they could possibly win. If you blog about crafts and other hobby-related things, for example, then having physical prizes might be more meaningful to you and your visitors.

Digital prizes, on the other hand, are great for sites that feature topics like web design and development, tutorials, offer web services (like hosting), etc. Gift certificates, ad spots, discounts, themes (providing you have skills) and more are all excellent giveaway prizes.

Some additional prize ideas:

  • Handmade crafts - Sites like Etsy are full of unique stuff, or you can make your own.
  • Books - Choose specific books you personally enjoy or find useful to your field.
  • Music - iTunes offers gift certificates that you can email directly to the winner.
  • Domains - A specific domain you want to give away or a gift certificate to a registrar.
  • T-shirts - People LOVE t-shirts! Threadless is a great site for artsy & witty ones.
  • Subscriptions - Useful or fun apps like Flickr and DeviantArt, or games like WoW.
  • Donations - Offer to donate to a charity (or developer!) of the winner's choice.

Keep in mind that if you use physical prizes there may be extra costs for shipping, especially if you want your contest to be available to international participants.

2. Choose an entry method that is easy to understand and retweet.

The whole point of holding a contest on Twitter is to rack up those retweets! The more people that retweet your phrase, link or #hashtag the better, as it generates more buzz about your contest and your site. Here are three popular conventions used:

  1. Tweeting a #hashtag multiple times.
    • Participants enter by tweeting a hashtag (appended to any tweet) as often as possible to get a better chance at winning. If your contest becomes really popular it has the possibility of going viral and getting tons of coverage, like #moonfruit and #squarespace did.
    • However, while it can create massive attention to your contest, you also run the risk of angering Twitter users as well. Constant tweeting of a phrase or a hashtag can be incredibly annoying and spam-like.
  2. Tweeting a phrase or #hashtag once.
    • It's easy for people to simply retweet something one time to enter the contest and not have to worry about being unfollowed for potentially mimicking spam.
    • You may have to be a bit more proactive in promoting the contest yourself, as participants won't be retweeting it often enough to reach as many people.
  3. Commenting on a blog post, referred by a retweet.
    • I've noticed a few contests lately using this method, where you instruct those interested to leave a comment on a specific blog post (usually the contest announcement) and retweet a phrase once. If you don't feel like tracking entries via Twitter, this way might be easiest.
    • Compared to the above two methods, you'll probably have to be the most proactive in promoting your contest with this one. It's not as simple as a retweet alone.

Another idea is to have your followers creatively come up with a funny phrase or witty remark to append to your contest's hashtag. You could also ask trivia questions that your followers must answer first to win. This makes it personalized for the participant and more fun to join in on, however it does require more of your attention to watch all the entries.

3. Work out a fair way to pick the winner that is also easy for you to maintain.

Choosing a winner by random drawing is usually the best solution. The entry method you use determines how difficult it will be to keep track of all the entries. For example, if you choose the multiple tweet/hashtag method, then you'll need to count all instances of that hashtag.

Twitter apps can help with this process: twtaway, tweetaways and TweetsWin can all randomly draw winners from tweeted entries. At the moment, they will only count one entry per person, so it won't work to use either for a multiple hashtag contest. If you're opting for a trivia-type contest, a good app to try is itweet2win.

Apps that provide hashtag tracking, like PubliciTweet, TweetGrid, Monitter, and CoTweet, can also be useful if you're wanting to personally count the entries yourself. If all else fail-whales, you can always fall back to the good ol' Twitter Search.

If you are considering using any of the suggested apps, run a trial contest first so you get familiar with how the app works. It won't be fun for you or your followers if the contest becomes confusing to manage and participate in.

4. Keep the contest time limit around 1-3 days.

Unless you are giving away iPhones or $100 worth of stuff from somewhere, it's better to keep the timeline on the shorter side for your contest. People might forget about entering or lose interest if they have to wait a week to find out if they won a t-shirt. You want to keep people on their toes! They must be antsy with anticipation! ;)

That being said, anything less than 24 hours (unless you have very attentive followers) probably won't be viable at effectively promoting your site. Don't forget to mention the contest every so often as well, to make sure the announcement has reached all your followers. An easy way to do this is to schedule tweets throughout the contest using an app like HootSuite.

5. Hype it up way in advance of the actual contest date.

At least one or two weeks prior to the giveaway taking place, post little teaser tweets about an amazing upcoming contest that you'll be hosting. Announce the prizes you'll be giving away as well as any details on how your followers should enter, so they can prepare ahead if interested.

This pre-promotion is especially important if the contest is to commemorate an event, like an anniversary (site/company open for X number of years), a new product, a site launch or redesign, etc. You can use the Twitter contest to stir up some extra attention for your event!

Conclusion & other resources.

If you are serious about promoting your website, then consider it an investment to host a contest. You don't need to spend a lot of money to do so (in total I spent only about $25 for my event) and it's well worth it to get that coveted traffic boost.

I believe that a site owner has no right to complain that they never have many visitors if they don't do much to promote it on the web. It's silly to assume that just because your website exists it will be visited by lots of people. It's like holding a yard sale and not putting up any signs or advertising... then wondering why no one shows up. ;)

Take care of your website and it will take care of you! More Twitter contest articles: