Surprise Twitter giveaways that will make people love your business.
Twitter giveaways are a great tool to get people talking about your business. It’s best to think of a giveaway as an investment and a marketing expense. While you usually have to spend money or goods to do a giveaway, the return on your investment will be high if it’s done right. Here are some best practices on successful Twitter giveaways:
- Don’t break the bank
- People like free things, even if it’s only worth $10. A lot of small businesses will devote $40 a month to giveaways and do one $10 giveaway each week to generate interest and engagement with their brand and to promote new products or services.
- The prize can be a gift card for your business, company swag (like a t-shirt or keychain), or you can even collaborate with another non-competitive business to put together a package and have them cross-promote as well which will give you a much broader reach.
- Go with a theme
- Gerber Plumbing (@GerberPlumbing) is a great example of this. While they have a large budget for their prizes, they stick to a theme which makes the giveaway more interesting. They did a week of “summer giveaways” in which they had items each day that would help people have a great summer, including a bluetooth speaker, a grill, and a GoPro camera.
- Get interactive
- Giveaways are a great way to build your following on Twitter. In order to qualify for the giveaway, participants must follow you, like or retweet the post, or respond to the post. This is a great way to organically grow your following because friends of your followers will see you on their timeline!
- Another way you can get interactive with the right people on Twitter is to look for hashtags from users and surprise those people with something of value. For example, if you are an auto repair/oil & lube shop, you can do a location search for people in your area using the hashtag #carproblems – surprise one of them with a public tweet for a free oil change. Others will see this and you can post to other social media congratulating the person with a caption like “We can’t let one of our own good citizens of Orange County drive around in a car that needs an oil change! This one’s on us Nancy!” You will create good will in your local community and Nancy will likely be a customer for life. That’s a pretty low cost to come across as a hero in your community.
There are many ways to run a giveaway campaign: caption contests, trivia, tag-a-friend, and the list goes on. If you have never done a giveaway before, a simple option will be the best one. Tell your followers to “Like this tweet to enter our giveaway.” Then, randomly pick a winner from those who liked the tweet. Once you have a larger, and more engaged following, you can branch out into other options.