Twitter contests are a great way to generate buzz and engage with your audiences online, and most importantly it increases your brands awareness. Running contests and involving users has the ability to attract new audience to your site and get more followers. A lot of marketers provide perks/rewards in order to increase the participation, shares and exposure to the brand.

twitter contests

With Twitter recently opening more ways to leverage images on Twitter with tagging and collage feature, you can be more creative and smart than ever. Here are 5 examples of effective Twitter contest, you can leverage these strategies for your business as well.

1. Quickest Correct Answer

These contest creates a lot of hype, as your followers are rapt with attention, waiting for the next question to come so they immediately answer and wait for the next one. Before you start this contest you should create a lot of hype so it creates a level of inquisitiveness in your audiences and they wait to see of what is to come from your brand.

It advisable that you do some test questions too, so that it will be easy for users to understand and participate. The duration of the contest depends on you, but as it’s the quickest correct answer contest you should wrap it up quickly or your audiences after some time will lose interest.

Example– Burrp was the online media partner for Sunburn Festival which was presenting Deadmau5 an EDM artist who had a gig in town very recently. The followers were asked 6 questions and those who answered them correctly and quickly won passes for this gig. 2 winners were announced. With this it created hype and awareness for the event as well as participation to win the passes.

2. Photo Contest

Photo Contest is a great idea to get your customers involved with your brand more closely. By doing so you are driving more awareness to your brands Twitter presence and about your brand as well. You can design various photo contests which involves your brand or the industry it belongs to. It makes the whole experience personal as they share their pictures, even their friends or family following them can see it. Thus with that it increases the exposure and reach, leads to increased participation and more visibility.

Example– The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), ran a contest on twitter to celebrate civil engineering by integrating this contest with their Facebook platform as well thus to increase exposure and drive more participation. The best part is they are providing tips on how to take good pictures on their Twitter to make sure they are getting some good entries and it also encourages participation.

3. Follow, Re-tweet and Win

This is one of the most popular competitions on Twitter as it’s simple but effective. The only thing audiences need to do is follow you and retweet you to be in with a chance of winning. In these contest you can just pick up the winner randomly. These contest really help you in getting more followers, you can try Rafflecopter which is a great tool I have used in past. It is a very easy contest to hold, all you need is a worthy giveaway which will make them retweet and follow you!

Example– GSVU Lakers are currently giving away to their followers a trip to LA for 2. This is such a substantial reward, which makes the users want to participate and win the prize. To win this trip – people need to follow them; Retweet and then they stand a chance to win. This is great way to increase awareness, followers and increased participation.

4. #Hashtag Contest

Almost any type of contest you run on Twitter, involves a hashtag so it gets easier to find results and measure. This contest is where you can ask your followers to use certain #Hashtag in their tweets and choosing a winner is totally on you. The perk of this contest is till the time the winner is not decided, users keep using the particular hashtag with every tweet of theirs as they want to increase their chances of winning. With this there a great chances your #Hashtag might even get trending on Twitter.

Example– Maybelline India ran a contest very recently on Twitter, which we covered it as well to promote their new products. In which users had to use the hashtag #ILovePinkBecause and they would choose winners randomly. With people using this hashtag so much it lead for it to trend for 24+ hours and increased exposure to their brand products.

5. Most Creative Answers

In a creative answer competition, you ask your followers to participate by answering a question and letting them know that the most creative answers stand a chance to win. People love to flaunt their creativity, and when given the opportunity you will be blasted with umpteen answers. You can easily partake in this type of contest by asking a funny question related to your brand or industry and ask your followers to participate by using a particular hashtag as well.

Example– Fiami Di Wells Men ran a similar contest very recently, where they asked their followers to tweet #FiamiIsAlliNeed because…. with interesting answers. And they chose 15 winners. They encouraged their followers to share this contest as it would earn them brownie points and a chance to win a pen-drive as well apart from the goodies to be won in the contest. Great marketing strategy to increase followers, awareness and participation!

As I said before, running contest is one of the superb ways to promote your business and increase followers. But creating, executing and monitoring these contests by yourself can be extremely tedious and you always need help. Help comes in the form of Social Media tools, which will make the entire process easy and it will do all the heavy lifting for you. Here are two of my favourites-

1. Binkd

Binkd is a Twitter contest app that can help you get your brand’s message across a wider audience by creating contests to get people participating, retweeting and mentioning your content across their handles. This tool will help you from the set up to brainstorming and implementing the contest on your account with a dedicated web page.

2. OneKontest

OneKontest’s features make it easy to run a hashtag contest, a photo contest, a trivia contest or even a feedback contest apart from the other multiple options. All you need to do is fill in the appropriate details, customize it as per your brand needs and everything else will be done by OneKontest.

Businesses use competitions to attract more potential customers, increased traffic to website and awareness of other digital platforms as well. Once you are done with the contest, there is still lot to do! Engaging with your new target audience and creating lasting relationships with them.

Have you run a Twitter Contest? How did you do it? Faced any challenges? Do share your insights with us in the comments section below.