Who has run a Twitter competition?

[accelerator]

Once I've sorted out a few things on the site, I'm thinking of running a Twitter comp for LowPrices.co.uk. So far I'm thinking start with a small prize and see what response I get. Thinking of a £20 Amazon voucher.

Has anyone run a Twitter competition and do u think you'll get a good response with a £20 Amazon voucher?

Thanks

 

[DaveP]

Once I've sorted out a few things on the site

Are you going to sort out the design and interface most importantly? You absolutely should before running any competitions.

 

[alex]

We've run a few twitter competitions with Amazon vouchers as prizes, but the results weren't great. Hundreds of retweets, hundreds of clicks, no additional follows and no additional sales. It got picked up by people who obviously spend their time entering any and every competition possible. Of course completely different industry so may work well for you.

What are you trying to achieve by doing this?

 

[accelerator]

We've run a few twitter competitions with Amazon vouchers as prizes, but the results weren't great. Hundreds of retweets, hundreds of clicks, no additional follows and no additional sales. It got picked up by people who obviously spend their time entering any and every competition possible. Of course completely different industry so may work well for you.

What are you trying to achieve by doing this?

More followers, and yes, I thought they were probably lots of compers out there. Hopefully they'd be buyers too, but not sure.

Thanks

 

[accelerator]

Are you going to sort out the design and interface most importantly? You absolutely should before running any competitions.

I am going to redesign at some point, but first I'm going to sort the site map and put proper pages to all major shopping categories in place. Then I'll try and apply a redesign over the pages that list the best shops for particular items. Redesigning the price comparison part is harder because it's just Awin's ShopWindow solution and I find the code hard to modify.

Rgds

 

[max99x]

ye i wouldn't bother running a comp till you have a decent looking site, if you did any traffic they'd more than likely leave straight away as the site looks like it's either not finished, is from the very first days of the internet or that the stylesheets missing...

 

[martin-s]

We run www.campetition.co.uk

Twitter is useless!

 

[accelerator]

ye i wouldn't bother running a comp till you have a decent looking site, if you did any traffic they'd more than likely leave straight away as the site looks like it's either not finished, is from the very first days of the internet or that the stylesheets missing...

Fair enough.

 

[accelerator]

We run www.campetition.co.uk

Twitter is useless!

OK, thanks for the reply.

 

[bonusmedia]

Campetition is great - one of the few I've actually entered.

I'd love to know how you got that going in the beginning?

I can see the value for both advertisers and users once it's at that sort of scale but how would you suggest going about driving traffic in the early days?

 

[martin-s]

A combination of things to be honest. In 18 months we've grown our email list to almost 30k (from near scratch) through the following:

* One email warming up an old list of about 1,500
* Promotion across our network of sites (60 ish relevant sites)
* Facebook paid ads (do ok, but you're doing well if you keep it to 20p a click and 50-60% conversion)
* Twitter (useless, like I say)
* Competition sites (probably the major factor - see my post here http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/internet-marketing/122655-advertising-competition.html#post475705)
* A competition we ran on Sun+ (quite a big impact on our list, but the brands were a bit disappointed with the value they got)
* Prize contributor brand cooperation (their social media, email lists, etc.)
* Competition marketing partners (their social media, email lists, etc. in return for branding on the site)

There's still plenty more ideas we have in the pipeline - and it's worth pointing out that it's the two 'epic' Campetitions we run each year that have the biggest impact on subscriber numbers.

We were lucky to be able to use the leverage our website network gives us to swap prizes for banner ads in the launch Campetition. We raised £5k in prizes and got 3k+ entries if memory serves.

Edit - oh, and thanks

 

[bonusmedia]

Thank you - really interesting stuff

 

[murph]

Twitter follower comps might appear useless, but people take note of an account with eg 10,000 followers, far more so than one with 100. Can help to gain genuine followers.

 

[Brassneck]

Twitter follower comps might appear useless, but people take note of an account with eg 10,000 followers, far more so than one with 100. Can help to gain genuine followers.

That's very true. I used competitions to get a few blogs above 1000 followers and there is steady growth of genuine followers on those ones now.

 

[martin-s]

Yes, that's true for Facebook and Twitter. Having followers and fans definitely gives you credibility.

And although Twitter hasn't been very good to drive competition entries, having a competition has certainly (slowly) built our follower base.

 

[accelerator]

We run www.campetition.co.uk

Twitter is useless!

You are saying it's useless, but I don't think you're Tweeting enough. You look to be Tweeting approx once a day. Try Tweeting once every half an hour and see if that has some impact. Remember a given Tweet is fleeting, so you need to be Tweeting a lot to get any visibility.

I've followed by the way. If you want to follow @lowpricesuk then great.

Cheers

Chris

 

[accelerator]

Also, do you do any Twitter competitions where you say "RT to win", as that would help you build your followers.

Rgds

 

[martin-s]

My thinking is that RT to win competitions are basically like building your castle on quicksand. Who's to say that Twitter won't go the same way as Facebook and limit the percentage of followers who see your posts?

Running competitions take time and therefore money. I'd want to get something a bit more valuable than a follower for that investment. Require email addresses and you have a growing asset.

I'm a big believer in doing marketing how it works for you, rather than just following the crowd. I've seen accounts with 200k+ followers, 60%+ 'real', who get 1 or 2 engagements per tweet at best. It might look impressive (which has a brand perception value, sure), but it doesn't actually mean anything without engagement.

We've had the Twitter a/c for quite a while and tried various approaches to get to this stage, but not yet seen much value overall and so we don't invest much time currently. I think Twitter works better as a magnifier for content, once you have a good network of influencers who know and like your stuff.

I'm also not a big fan of tweet spam to be honest. For me, like all social media, Twitter should be about building relationships rather than broadcast marketing

 

[accelerator]

Running competitions take time and therefore money. I'd want to get something a bit more valuable than a follower for that investment. Require email addresses and you have a growing asset.

Fair enough, I agree an e-mail subscriber is much more valuable.

I like Twitter, although with 398 followers I'm hardly a genius at it, but I feel convincing people to follow a price comparison site is not easy. That said, I think the best Twitter accounts can get a lot of followers without spending anything, and the RT network effect makes it powerful.

Rgds