Advice to run a fair and successful twitter giveaway/contest?

November 10, 2012 6:44 AM

Advice to run a fair and successful twitter giveaway/contest?

To celebrate the season of giving and being thankful, I would like to run a twitter giveaway to the community I am a part of.. and, selfishly, to gain a few followers in the process.

Anyone who uses twitter is probably use to the style of giveaways on it. I'm looking at a "Follow @me and retweet this tweet to enter" style giveaway.

I want to be fair in this. Should I just pick one of my followers at the end of the contest and not worry about tracking who actually retweeted the tweet?

How do I collect all my followers and randomly pick a winner? Are there any webapps that will collect the names of my followers that I can then plop into excell and use a random number generator in order to pick one?

Any other suggestions or something I might be looking over?

posted by royalsong to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Sounds pretty reasonable to me! I'm a community manager in the UK. The rules for running giveaways may vary where you are, but what I usually do for my brands is write a message with a "RT & follow by *time* *date* to be in to win a *PRIZE* *LINK to Ts&Cs*" I think including the parameters are really important to reduce complaints of unfairness.

I then use Crowdbooster to see actual RTs and use a number generator to pick someone at random. Hopefully they are following my brand account, if not I redraw. Obviously I want a return for my effort/$$$ so the winner has to be someone who followed the competition guidelines, not some competition hunter who RTs everything using a bot.
posted by teststrip at 7:03 AM on November 10, 2012

You might also want to set some conditions as to who is eligible to win the prize. I'm thinking specifically in terms of age and geography. You don't want to be on the hook for postage if someone lives halfway across the world or have to deal with angry parents if it turns out that the winner is 13 years old.
posted by arcolz at 9:33 AM on November 10, 2012

Friends of mine who have done this sort of thing often physically write the names down on pieces of paper and put them in a bucket. It sounds ridiculous but it works!
posted by Narrative Priorities at 12:02 PM on November 10, 2012