As a Business Owner or Brand Executive, you know that Twitter is one of the most powerful ways to interact with people in real time and a terrific tool to drive people to your sweepstakes. Twitter sweepstakes allow you to build and maintain awareness of your brand as current and prospective customers share their thoughts and participate in your sweepstakes. Giving them an incentive to share the sweepstakes message can extend involvement to their Twitter followers.
Adding Twitter to your communication strategy provides another media vehicle for people to follow your brand. By sharing the sweepstakes on Twitter, you get fans, friends of fans through re-tweets, and a whole lot of potential new customers. Users follow your brand using the @ sign and interact with the specific sweepstakes through the use of the # or hashtag.
How to Use a Sweepstakes on Twitter
Having a Clear Objective
Make sure your Twitter objectives are defined. The most common is to get additional followers to your Twitter handle (@yourbrand). A more ambitious objective is to open up an individual dialogue with consumers who self-identify themselves as ambassadors of your brand creating a strong objective, a clear landing page for users to find, offering something they want, and outlining carefully how they can win. This is the key to a successful sweepstakes campaign.
Keep it Active
Tweeting isn’t a one time event. With all social media, the message must be refreshed for relevance. You have to keep the volume pumped up on your campaign, and this means tweeting as often as possible. By keeping tweets active, you embed your brand in the conversation, which is the essence of good social media marketing. Just be mindful of some Twitter guidelines for frequency of tweets. Twitter has a rule against posting too many undifferentiated tweets in too short a period of time.
Keep it Simple
Keep your campaign easy to follow. It should be crystal clear how users get to your promotional microsite or Facebook landing page in order to participate in the promotion.
Hashtags
Make sure you use a dedicated hashtag to keep everyone focused on your sweepstakes messages. When you use“#”you identify the subject quickly, allowing others to quickly join the conversation. This also makes it possible to increase involvement in your sweepstakes. When your followers retweet using the suggested hashtag, it’s easier for their Twitter followers to get the sweepstakes message.
Twitter Sweepstakes Prizes
Follow the same rules for selecting prizes as you would for any other sweepstakes promotion. Make your prizes intriguing and consistent with your brand image. When using a Twitter sweepstakes as a component of a larger promotional campaign, consider cash prizes. Everyone understands cash and it doesn’t compete with other messages that may be circulating. The Twitter sweepstakes is the only component of the promotion where you can consider prizes that are fun and creative.
Stick with the Rules
Pay strict attention to the rules. In addition to lottery laws there are FTC Testimonial and Endorsement guidelines that must be disclosed by the sponsor. For example; a link must be provided to a hosted page of disclosures so that any reader understands that the tweet they are seeing has actually earned an entry into the sweepstakes. With the help of an experienced agency, these requirements are easy to navigate.
Contact the experts at Marden-Kane today to discuss where a Twitter sweepstakes fits in with your overall promotion marketing strategy.