CheapTweet Blog

Our sponsor Jockey is giving away a Ford Mustang!

This summer, you could win a classic Ford Mustang just by entering Jockey’s contest. And there are a ton of other cool prizes, like Jockey gift certificates and merchandise.

Click on the image below for more details. And be sure to follow @Jockey on Twitter, so you can stay updated on all their sales and contests (for example, there just might be some giveaways coming up in April). Good luck!

Help us name our new mascot! We’re running a contest to see who can come up with the best name for our new pig. Just tweet:

Hey @cheaptweet, name the pig _____! http://bit.ly/c0cjdZ #cheaptweetpig

and you’ll be entered to win some cool CheapTweet swag and be immortalized for your pig-naming skills.

You’re probably familiar with our beloved mascot – the adorable bird who tweets about good deals. We’ve had this bird for more than a year, but it’s time for us to move on. So as we usher in a new era of finding deals, we say goodbye to the bird and present to you the new CheapTweet mascot – this incredibly cute little pig.

But this pig needs a name! And we need your help in picking something really, really good. Starting right now, we’re going to solicit all the name recommendations we can via Twitter. We’ll then pick our favorite name and whoever comes up with that name will win a great prize!

To enter, post this message with your name idea: “Hey @cheaptweet, name the pig _______! http://bit.ly/c0cjdZ #cheaptweetpig”

• Tweet the message above with your suggestion filled in
• Don’t DM us
• Tweet as many name suggestions as you want

The contest will run through Thursday night.

• Contest ends at 10:00 p.m. CST, Thursday, 3/11/10
• We’ll announce the winner on Friday, 3/12/10

Whoever picks the best name gets a great prize!

• The CheapTweet team will select their favorite name from all the suggestions
• Whoever picks the best name will win a CheapTweet t-shirt, plus other fun surprises
• If we find more than one name we like, we might have a run-off

So, what do you think should we name our new pig?

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.

PerpetualKid.com and Cheaptweet.com have joined forces for a Gift Certificate Giveaway, exclusively on Twitter this week.

Win a $25 PerpetualKid.com gift certificate!  We’re giving away $25.00 gift certificates to 20 lucky winners who follow both @Perpetual_Kid and @CheapTweet on Twitter.

When: Starting today (Monday, 7/20/09) and ending at 12:00 p.m. EDT on Friday (7/24/09)
Where: Twitter – of course!
How: Follow these simple steps.

1. Follow both @Perpetual_Kid and @CheapTweet on Twitter
   
2. Tweet the following: “I entered the @Perpetual_Kid and @CheapTweet Midsummer Giveaway just by following them! http://bit.ly/QjFZr #PerpetualKid”
3. That’s it! You’re done!

On Friday (7/24/09), 20 winners will be chosen at random to receive their $25.00 gift certificate to PerpetualKid.com! Winners will be notified by Twitter, so keep checking your Twitter account on Friday. Good luck!