Small Business Owners: Two Real Life Examples of Using Twitter Contests to Grow Your List

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EXAMPLE #1. Shoebox.com gave 2 flip mino’s away in February of 2009. In exchange they got 2,000 new Twitter followers in 2 days. A Flip UltraHD Camcorderis only $139 on Amazon. Would you invest less than $300 to get 2,000 new Twitter followers? It worked for Shoemoney.com.

Here are three reasons why this contest worked:

1 – Twitter users are usually technically savvy. They want the newest gadgets available. Offering a hot new “toy” makes perfect sense.

2 - When someone tweets about your contest, all their followers see the “Tweet” and the link to your contest page. Which gets more and more and more people finding out about you very quickly. 

3 - People watch the trending topics on Twitter. In fact, you can go to http://www.twitscoop.com/ and find all the trending topics. If enough people tweet about your contest, it becomes a trending topic. This can cause an avalanche of tweets.

Here are more details about the contest:

http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/01/15/twitter-viral-contest/

EXAMPLE #2. Sumer, LLC Gives Away a Free Workshop to People Who Tweet, Blog or Mention their workshop on Facebook 

Here’s how the Sumer contest worked:

1 – If you comment on the contest page, you’re entered in the contest

2 – Tweet, Facebook, or blog about the workshop and you could win a free workshop.

Here are the reasons this contest was an all around winner:

First, only people who are your prospects enter the contest. They want whatever services you offer, or they wouldn’t enter the contest in the first place. This keeps your list “clean.”

Second, since “birds of a feather flock together,”  the contestants’ friends will be good prospects too. Not all of them, but enough.

Third, by having contestants, Tweet, blog or Facebook about the event you’re exposing prospects multiple times to your contest.

See the actual blog post announcing the contest here, http://writtenbysumer.com/blog/?p=2722.

Twitter Official Guidelines for Contests

Before you create your next contest, review Twitter’s guidelines here:

http://help.twitter.com/forums/26810/entries/68877

Did you find this post helpful? Would you like more blog posts like this one? Type in the “Leave a Reply” space below. Tell me what you think.

Sincerely,

Doug Stewart

“Giving You the Power to Fight the Big Boys!”

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• Yahoo Adds Twitter to Search Results (blogs.wsj.com)
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• #newsrw: How to put news:rewired on your own blog (blogs.journalism.co.uk)

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