CheapTweet Blog

Yesterday there was an article in the Wall Street Journal about contests on Twitter, which is oddly well-timed, because we’ve been talking about this a lot in the CheapTweet offices lately. What’s the best kind of Twitter contest and more importantly, how effective are contests on Twitter?

The types of Twitter contests

Right now – and this changes quickly – there are four main types of the simple Twitter contest: sign-up forms, follower gathering, retweets, and hashtags. There are certainly others, but these seem to be the most popular at the moment.

Sign-up forms are a fairly old-school tactic that encourage people to sign up to be entered to win a prize. It’s a quick, easy way to build your contact list for newsletters and company mailings. People can be hesitant to enter email addresses or even Twitter names for fear of spam, so be clear why you’re collecting contact info and what you will do with it.

Follower gathering is a Twitter version of the traditional “when we reach X goal you win” promotion. In this case, participants are eligible to win when the target Twitter account reaches a certain number of followers. Followers are encouraged to tell their friends to follow the target account.  The more complex contests involve multiple goal tiers with increasingly valuable prizes.  Sometimes these can seem like blatant popularity contests, so think carefully with your wording of contest rules.

Retweets are one of the best forms of viral marketing on Twitter. They are fast and simple and they put your message in front of your followers’ followers.  The goal is to get your followers to promote your promotion for you. Everyone who retweets the promotional tweet is entered to win. The trick with this kind of contest is to make the promotional tweet as interesting, valuable and transparent as possible. People don’t want to spam their followers any more than you do.

Hashtags are another way you get your followers to promote your contest for you.  On Twitter, a hashtag is a hyperlinked keyword. Any word that starts with a pound sign (#) becomes a hashtag, which becomes a clickable link to all other mentions of that word. It’s instant advertising; if that hashtag shows up in someone’s Twitter stream, that person can click on it and see everything everyone else has said with that hashtag. If someone sees a particular hashtag often enough, they’re likely to use it themselves. This type of contest can work very well, as Moonfruit saw recently, if you allow users to tweet whatever they want as long as they use the hashtag. The catch here is that they might tweet negative or totally unrelated things with the hashtag.

What we’ve learned so far about Twitter contests

The Twitter contest is typically a fairly inexpensive and fast way to build awareness of a brand or Twitter account. Prizes don’t have to be expensive (though, like in any other contest, better prizes get better results), and these contests take minimal effort to oversee.

A good example of a recent successful Twitter contest is the #moonfruit promotion from early July; anyone who used the #moonfruit hashtag was entered to win.  At the height of the contest, the Moonfruit Twitter account (@moontweet) had more than 47,000 followers. Two weeks later, and they’re down to 33,000. That is still a huge number, considering they started with just about 400 followers.  Moonfruit gave away 10 Macbook Pro laptops to earn those numbers, which is a pretty hefty prize, but they’re reporting increases in site traffic and paying customers.

We’ve done several Twitter contests in partnership with CheapTweet sponsors, and they’ve worked well. We see increased traffic to CheapTweet.com and more Twitter followers. In fact, we like contests so much that we’re running one right now with Perpetual Kid (which happens to be one of our favorite websites, as well as a CheapTweet Store).  We try to only promote companies and products that we like and we hope our followers will like. And we try to space contests out; we don’t want to flood our stream with contests and giveaways. People like free stuff, but they don’t like incessant advertising in their Twitter streams.

Finally, we’ve learned how important it is to measure the impact of a Twitter contest. Be sure you’re tracking the tweets posted during the contest and analyzing other metrics after the contest is over. Of course we’re partial to TweetReach for Twitter measurement, but there are lots of tools you can use. Read this post on the TweetReach blog for more details about what to measure when for Twitter contests and parties.

So, do Twitter contests work?

The short answer is yes, they can work. The long answer is well, they kinda work, for a limited time. The even longer answer is they work well considering the time and effort it takes to run them, and are a great way to get some fast and often significant buzz on Twitter, but it can be short-lived.

I just don’t think the simple retweet or hashtag contests have much life left in them. My Twitter stream is filled with contests and promotions, which is fine for now. But I think we’re quickly reaching the saturation point for the kinds of contests we’ve seen so far. This is not to say the Twitter contest is dead, but they will have to change form to remain effective. It’s what we’ve seen for everything on Twitter so far – what works in the beginning is not going to work a few months later.

So, if you’re thinking about running a Twitter contest, do it now! There’s still plenty of opportunity to find new followers and expose your brand to a large, new audience. But as fast as things change on Twitter, I expect that the “retweet or use this hashtag this to win a prize” contest won’t be as alluring in a few months as it is now.