Twitter competition ideas

There have been a few good quesitons around recently with Public Relations agencies in particular seeking ideas for competitions that can run on Twitter.

Running a competition is a good way of building new followers for social media communication channels – it also helps for brand awareness.  A contest doesn’t need to be expensive, or complex but the prize must fit the audience and be desirable.

Here are a few suggestions for Twitter contests:

1. Short story – include an opening, middle and end in 140 characters
2. Announce a photo theme and get uploaded photos on the theme
3. Trivia question – allow funny, serious and absurd answers
4. Buy a product and announce the invoice number on Twitter to enter a contest for a free prize
5. Threadless tweet submisssion for printing on a t-shirt
6. Collaborative songwriting / include your phrase or name in a song
7. Joke sharing like the #bandfoodpuns on May 17th
8. Munich beer contest to promote an expo – visit site and when the beer glass is empty the last person to RT the URL wins

Some marketing management suggestions

1. Hashtag# the contest so you can track entrants
2. Unique phrase with retweeting gets topics trending
3. Contest entry added to follower request builds a following/community
4. Use the contest to relaunch your twitter identity
5. Frequent $100 prizes beat a big $500 prize
6. Short deadline contests create urgency

Twitter competition prize ideas

1. money
2. music album downloads
3. free product from your company
4. a digital gadget – camera, phone, MP3 etc
5. gift card from a recognised store
6. a free service from your company
7. a trip
8. pay for a service for them from the winner’s favourite supplier (massage, haircut, car wash, online data backup, membership of a group / team fanclub)
9. Music prizes – albums, concert tickets,

An example of a current twitter competition

Take a look a the Social Media Experiment at Glastonbury 2010 running now which I learnt about from the Chinwag group on LinkedIn.

The Social Media Experiment will take place on Friday the 25th June between 1pm & Midnight, and will feature a number of comedians, musicians, performance artists and live shows incorporating social media and interactive web technologies.  the prize is the chance to perform live on stage at Glastonbury

In order to win, visitors to the site are asked to join the competition group on Facebook and post a link to prove that they are a in a band, an artists etc. The winning act will then be chosen from the group at random in this ‘flash mob’ style competition.