Six Ways To Host A Winning Twitter Competition
Contests can be a great way to draw people to engage with your business and help you to promote your brand, and social media provides a convenient and simple medium on which to run one. By offering a little quid pro quo, you can often gain the same return as a whole load of hashtags. Twitter in particular is a great platform from which to run a successful social media competition, as it provides a quick and easy way for your fans to interact.
However, running a competition on Twitter is not without its challenges. You need to have a clear goal in mind and the marketing knowhow and strategy to best use your competition to achieve it. There are many different ways in which to run a competition and you need to know which ways best suit your particular aims.
So, in order to use your Twitter contest to engage with your followers and convert them into email leads and eventually long-term customers, you are going to need some tips. Thankfully markITwrite is here to assist once again, with six ways to host a winning Twitter competition.
#1. What Sort Of Contest Do You Want To Run?
There are many different types of contest that you can run using Twitter and which one you choose will depend on a couple of factors.
First of all you need to think about in which ways you want the competition to benefit your business. Sweepstakes are a great way to gather email addresses for your contact book or to gain more followers on Twitter itself, whereas contests that involve a vote can get people to interact with your brand in a meaningful way, such as choosing a favourite product or service.
It could be that you are looking to increase the extent to which your followers engage with your business on social media and contests can be used to this extent as well. You can get your followers to create individual pieces of content such as videos, photos or even an essay. By tying the subject matter of this content to your business, you can not only gain “free” promotional material, but also valuable insights as to the ways in which people perceive you.
The other factor you need to consider is how high you want the barrier to entry to be. Things like sweepstakes or votes have a low barrier as they simply require entrants to enter an email address, click an option or post a retweet.
Alternatively contests that require entrants to create content have a higher barrier to entry. Whilst most people are able to take a photo or write a short piece about your company, these things do require a little more effort and a certain degree of creativity. Videos in particular are far more advanced to create and running a video contest will set the barrier even higher.
The height of your entry barrier will determine how many people will enter your competition. If the barrier is low then you may expect a great deal of entries, whereas if it is high you can expect there to be far less as a result.
#2. The Glittering Prize
Choosing the right prize will also have a big effect on the success of your competition. The prize will be the main motivating factor for people entering your contest so you need to make sure that you get it right.
Whilst an appealing prize that is not related to your business may gain more attention, they won’t necessarily be people that are likely to end up becoming customers, which should be your overarching goal. A great deal of the people will be entering simply to win the prize and will then likely disappear into the ether.
Instead make the prize something that relates to your business. A gift certificate will all but guarantee that the winner will purchase something from you. Also, the people that enter are likely to browse your store as they think about what they will buy should they win. This could mean that, even if they don’t win, they may make a purchase anyway as they have already built up the desire for the product.
Alternatively you could offer a product from your line. This will not only give the winner a sample of the wares that you can offer, but will also likely build desire in your entrants. This may lead them to purchase the item anyway, even if they don’t win.
#3. Creating The Contest
Now that you have decided on a competition type and a great prize, the time has come to actually build the nuts and bolts of the contest.
The first thing that you need is a title for the competition that will grab people’s attention. Keep it short, simple and with a clear call to action (CTA). Mention the fact that it is a competition, what the prize is and the name of the company (“Win a £30 voucher From Joe Bloggs Ltd. Enter Now!!” for example).
It is no secret that people respond well to visual stimuli. Make sure that you take advantage of this by including a picture of the prize (and be sure to mention its value as well). If you are offering a voucher, maybe provide a few examples of products that you offer that could be purchased with it.
Explain in as few sentences as possible all of the relevant details of the contest. Mention who it is open to, how to enter, the prize, how many are available and any important rules or restrictions. You can always include a link to the full terms and conditions, so there is no need to go overboard on the legal stuff on the competition page itself.
All a Twitter contest needs in terms of a submission page is a space to enter an email address and an enter button. If your competition involves the submission of a piece of content then it is a simple matter to include an area through which to upload it also. You may feel that you want to gather some demographic information as well (age, location etc.) and this is also very simple to achieve.
Also be sure to include share button to various social media platforms. The easier you make it for people to share your contest, the more likely they are to do it. Maybe consider adding an incentive for sharing, such as a bonus entry.
#4. Promote
Once your contest is live you can then fire up the promotion machine and start spreading the word.
The first step should be to send out an email informing all of your subscribers about the competition. An email blast will target those most likely to engage with the contest and should get you off to a flying start. Next you want to share it across your social media networks. This will bring in entrants, but will also attract your followers on other social media networks to your Twitter profile.
Place a banner advert on the homepage of your website to leverage the traffic that you have there and create a targeted Twitter advertisement to help spread the word to people who don’t already follow you. Send information about your contest to other related bloggers and media outlets and ask them nicely to promote it also.
There are also several dedicated websites on which people can post competition info for free. Use these to connect with a whole new demographic of competition addicts who otherwise may not have heard about you.
#5. Monitor
Use Google Alerts to monitor to what extent your competition is being discussed online and setup streams for all of the hashtags related to it. This way you can keep an eye on how well news of your contest is spreading and adjust your promotional efforts accordingly.
#6. The End Is Not The End
You may think that once your competition is finished and the winner is selected, that the work is over. However, you would be mistaken. Even whilst the buzz around your contest is cooling you can use it to keep people interested and engaged with your business.
Promote the winner themselves on your social media, blog and website. Tell people a little about them and what they won or are going to do with the voucher/money. This way people can see that a real person won the contest and may be more likely to enter future competitions.
Send emails out to all of the entrants – especially those who were not previously subscribers. Thank them for their entry and introduce them to your business. See if there are opportunities amongst them to convert them into leads or sales.
Always include details of when people can expect any future contests or promotions to keep them excited and interested.
There you have our six top tips for hosting a winning Twitter competition. Be sure to check out Twitter’s own guidelines for promotions to ensure that you don’t violate any of them. Follow our guide and Twitter’s rules and you should have no problem creating a fun and engaging contest that will help to promote your business and bring in lots of new and interested potential customers.
Have you ever hosted a Twitter competition and if so, how did it go? Did anything work particularly well, or is there anything that you would do differently next time?
Continue reading here: Top 3 Social Media Mistakes To Avoid At All Costs
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