Weekly Campaign Idea: Twitter Promotion

Have you been looking for a way to expand your reach on Twitter?

Engaging with like-minded people on Twitter has proven a successful business practice, but there’s a way to take it one step further: Twitter promotions. We know, you can’t actually run a promotion that is hosted within Twitter. But Twitter promotions can still be valuable and successful. The best thing you can do is to decide on the type of Twitter promotion you want to run and then launch it on an app or Campaign.

Today, we’re going to focus on a common Twitter promotion that we see businesses using ShortStack.com for:

A Tweet or Retweet to Enter promotion.These types of promotions are easy to build and execute because they require minimal design elements. Essentially, all you need is an image or video to post alongside your Twitter page and then a Campaign where your competition rules are hosted. Even though they’re easy to execute, there are still some best practices to remember for when you’re ready to jump into your next Twitter promotion.

5 Tips for Running a Twitter-Only Promotion

1. Understand Twitter’s promotion rules: Twitter has unique promotion rules that you’ll want to familiarize yourself with before running a contest. For example, your followers can get their accounts shut down if they post the same tweet too many times. In a competition where you’re asking people to retweet something, this could become an issue. We recommend setting up your campaign with vote and entry restrictions so that people can only vote or enter once or once per day.

‍2. Fully explain your entry procedure and rules on a Campaign: Twitter is based on 140-character updates, so it’s impossible to promote your contests and list your guidelines within a tweet. The workaround is to use a Campaign to host your promotion guidelines.

3. Know the who, what, where, when, why and say it in 140 characters or less: There’s no room for fluff when it comes to Twitter, so you’ll want to know your 5 w’s and determine the most important information your fans need to know in order to enter your promotion. In our example from Empire Cinemas they use RT in place of (Retweet) to save them some characters and shorten other words to get their point across. Don’t forget that you’ll also need to leave space for a link to your competition rules!

‍4. Use hashtags for further reach: Hashtags are an ideal way to keep up with the conversation around your Twitter contest. This means you’ll want to pick a specific hashtag for your Campaign and try and make it unique, as Empire does with #TheLastWitchHunter. Use the hashtag to communicate with your entrants throughout the competition and encourage them to share the promotion with their friends.

‍5. Consider collecting an email address as well: While the point of a tweet or retweet to enter a promotion is to have limited steps to enter, some businesses may still want to collect leads from their contest. If so, you can add an email entry form on your Campaign where your rules are being hosted.  The email entry doesn’t have to be a requirement to enter, it could be used as a way to receive extra entries or a chance to win an additional prize.

Example of a Twitter-Only Promotion

Empire Cinemas is a theater brand in England. To promote the release of an upcoming movie, “The Last Witch Hunter,” the cinema did a quick Retweet to Win promotion. In a tweet about their contest, they included relevant hashtags, a link to their contest rules (which are hosted on a Campaign) and all the details that their fans needed to know in order to enter. They also chose to include the video to support their contest, which is quite fitting since it’s for a movie release!