Gain Followers and Increase Social Engagement with Twitter Sweepstakes and Giveaways

So, one of your marketing goals for 2022 is to increase your followers and engagement on Twitter? You’ve come to the right place. Executing a sweepstakes or giveaway on the social platform can be a great strategy to drive quick results, whether it’s your first time or your seventh. But, any good social media sweepstakes or giveaway needs a defined strategy that aligns with your brand’s goals and the platform’s best practices. Continuing our social media series that started with Instagram, let’s take a look at the key considerations to keep in mind to run a successful giveaway or sweepstakes promotion on Twitter.

Setting up a Giveaway on Twitter

The first step in running a Twitter sweepstakes or giveaway is to identify the method of entry or how the consumer will enter to win the prize. As mentioned above, this should align with your unique goals for the campaign.

For example, if the goal is to increase followers on Twitter, it would be wise to direct consumers to follow your brand’s account as a step in the entry process. Or, if the goal is to build brand engagement, you might request that they retweet a specific post. This tactic could also build brand awareness as retweeting increases the potential visibility of your tweet.

Because Twitter is more instantaneous than other platforms, there is an opportunity to generate awareness for a sweepstakes or giveaway by driving social interaction to a microsite. The idea being that a brand can tease a giveaway in advance and encourage users to be a follower to find out about it live. For example, the first 25 consumers to enter may win the main prize, while entries thereafter would only be eligible for ‘smaller’ prizes. With this approach, customers would enter to win through the microsite, rather than directly on social, relying on the promotion messaging to foster audience growth.

Giveaways, Sweepstakes, and Contests on Twitter: How They Are Different

At Realtime Media, we have developed tools and services that help guide your social media promotion to fit your goals. There are distinct differences between sweepstakes, giveaways, and contests on Twitter, and they each have a different effect on compliance, entry steps, and winner selection. Here are a few key differences:

1. Sweepstakes: collects qualifying actions as entries. More entries produce a greater chance to win. Winners are randomly selected, and you may need to file state bonds or register your sweepstakes with individual states.
2. Giveaways: a first-come, first-served promotion while supplies last. Typically best executed by sending users from a Tweet to a microsite to collect complete information that is used to award prizes and verify eligibility. Can be combined with a sweepstakes with separate prizes for entrants who arrive after supplies run out.
3. Contests: a skill-based promotion where users post and tweet original content that is screened against judging criteria (at your discretion) in order to see which entry qualifies as the winner (or winners!).

There are several more aspects to the type of promotion we can help advise you on, but for this Twitter promotions guide, it’s time to talk next about why fans participate: the prizes.

Collect Entries from Twitter for Your Giveaway

It’s important to consider the time commitment involved with the entry process. Generally, if it sounds like it will take more than 60 seconds, many consumers will decide to pass. Instead of asking customers to like your tweet and to also post their own creative tweet or picture tagging your brand, requiring them to leave a comment might be the more time sensitive option. Your prize strategy can also affect the time entrants are willing to invest is the prize pool.

Lastly, you must also understand the legal guidelines to abide by, particularly those specific to Twitter. Luckily, our team at Realtime Media has developed and run hundreds of successful social media promotions and will be able to help your brand decide what route to take, while also guiding you to compliance on actions you incentivize participants to take and for advertising guidelines when promoting the sweepstakes or contest.

Giveaway Winners, Prizes and Promotion

Consider winner management one of the easier tasks at hand when you work with Realtime Media. We’ve figured out how to streamline the process of finding the promotion’s winner by developing an administrative tool to review text, photo, and video-based content from entries.

After finding your winner, you’ll need to go through a few steps to ensure the prize is applicable to the chosen winner. While social promotions are easy to enter, oftentimes, more information is needed to verify eligibility to claim prizes, completion of tax forms, and shipping of physical prizes. Using our Prize Claim solution, we can securely collect winner information, while also validating the accuracy of it.

Finally, make the most of all the attention you’ve garnered over the course of the social media promotion and interact with your new followers. Build excitement around the announcement of the winner(s) with a series of creative teaser tweets and ask the winners to post a tweet sharing their excitement in winning the prize.

If you’re thinking about running a Twitter sweepstakes or giveaway, remember that Realtime Media’s services can help make the process of the social media promotion easy for your brand from idealization to prize fulfillment.