Twitter Contests, done right

My thoughts on how Twitter contests should and should not be done.

Twitter is a nice and simple way to spread the word about what your company is all about. Contests is even better, especially for marketing and creating a big buzz. If you’re able to climb onto the trending topics on Twitter, you’re instantly getting thousands of hits just from people clicking different trends to get a quick input of “what’s hot” and “in”, updated realtime.

How you can do it

Two examples of a good (or bad, whichever way you look at it) way to market your stuff is Moonfruit and Squarespace. If you’re into Twitter you’ve probably seen the hashtags #moonfruit (www.moonfruit.com) and #squarespace (www.squarespace.com) appearing more than once from several people in the Twitterverse (me included, I love freebies, who doesn’t?). If you’re not seeing the marketing value in this example of doing contests on Twitter, let me do an easy mathematical calculation for you: Let’s say 20 people tweet “I love #moonfruit, I want to win the Macbook Pro! Look at www.moonfruit.com for details!”, and for the sake of simplicity lets say that each of those 20 individuals have 20 unique followers who receive their updates. So our calculation would be: 20×20 = 400.

But.. That’s not wrong

Put short, this would get 400 possible users, and clicks, for www.moonfruit.com, possibly even more. Isn’t that just wonderful? Well, some will definetely say that it’s an awesome way to market your new, or old, projects and products. It will certainly get a lot of hype and talk about your new, awesome stuff going. On the other side, some people will say that it’s awful and destroys Twitter.

I myself am split on the middle in this case, while I do find the spam created by these contests (happening once in a while) pretty dull and boring in the long run, I think it is a very good way to put your product up for a show. Whatever you say, it will get you a remarkable amount of attention, either in a good, or a bad way. Bad commercials are commercials too, and can often get you even more attention since people mock it over and over, and over.

How a lot of people prefer you doing it

However, I much prefer the “other way” of doing contests on Twitter. If you’re hosting a contest, great! It means I can win free stuff, and free stuff is always awesome even if my chances are as small as me winning the lottery. So just by saying “Hey, contest over here! Just follow me on Twitter and you’ll be able to win in any contest I host!” you’ll have me hooked, and I have a chance to win without doing anything other than following you. That’s most certainly a win-win situation for both of us. The proper way to do a contest on Twitter is in my opinion the following:

1. Find out what you want to give away on Twitter, something related to your blogging interests, or perhaps your own company products.
2. Create a webpage that explains the rules of your Twitter contest. Your rules should simply be something like “Follow @xxxxxx”, “You can tweet about this contest one time, more tweets will not give you a better chance at winning”.
3. Send out a small amount of tweets once in a while where you explain that you’re doing contests, and a link to where your rules can be found.

Examples of this way to do contests on Twitter can be seen here (Scott Bourne, focusing on Mac and Photo) and here.