We many not have won the Mega Millions last week, but we did have a blast with our Mega Millions Ticket Giveaway. Hosting a Twitter contest is great way to interact with your community and reach a new audience. Twitter has far fewer rules on hosting contests than Facebook, which makes it a more viable network for your next contest.
Here are five things that will make your next Twitter contest rock.
1. Simple instructions
Make participation as simple as possible: long, confusing instructions can discourage fan participation. Make sure you give clear step-by-step instructions so fans think more about winning/sharing your contest and less about how to enter.
We simplified our contest by providing a prepared tweet with a fill in the blank question. Fans just simply needed to copy, paste and fill in the blank – Hey @Vital_Design! If I won the #megamillions _________. #AlleyMadness.
2. Engage your existing community
Of course you want to reach a new audience with your Twitter contest, but first focus on your current community. Your current fans already love you! They’re the ones who are going to get excited and share your contest with friends. By connecting with and rewarding your current fan base you have the opportunity to build loyalty toward your brand.
The Seacoast community is pretty active on Twitter, and when we put the word out about our contest, the news spread quickly. It was our existing community that made the contest a success (although the chance of winning half a billion dollars probably didn’t hurt either).
3. Ensure brand recognition
Don’t forget, it’s key everyone knows who’s running the contest. Contests are a great way to build brand awareness, but unless your brand is mentioned in the tweet it’s unlikely people will know you’re behind it.
To ensure recognition we placed our name in the prepared tweet as a mention, not a reply. This allowed our username to be shared with 41,414 followers and generate 212,548 impressions. How do we know this? Bring on number four.
4. Use a hashtag to track
A hashtag is a simple yet effective way to track your contest’s reach. It’s important to keep hashtags short, relevant to your contest and most importantly unique. Make sure to search your hashtag. You want a hashtag that’s going to provide you with clean results, not a mess of unrelated tweets.
We chose the hashtag #AlleyMadness. Our alley is a fun part of our regular Twitter updates, so a lot of our followers are already familiar with it–plus, we can reuse that hashtag for future contests.
5. Have fun!
Chances are, everything isn’t going to run perfectly, but make sure to have fun. You can plan all you want, but something isn’t going to go as planned and that’s okay.
Twitter’s speed and reach makes it a great platform for your next contest. Contact us if you have questions or are looking for strategy. We’d love to help make your next contest a success.
