How To Get The Most Out Of Twitter Promotions

It’s a known fact that everyone loves freebies. Anything free will do from products to gift cards to service subscriptions. If you’re giving away something free and promote it correctly, you’re sure to receive a beneficial amount of traffic and new followers from it.

One of the best methods of running a promotion is through social media, with Twitter being an obvious first choice. Let’s take a look at some of the steps you should take in order to get the most out of your Twitter promotion. These tools were used by us at Kitchen Stools Direct when we did our contests on twitter.

Get Organized

You’ll need a detailed outline of your goals and the steps you’ll follow to achieve those goals. You’ll need to market your promotion so that people will know about it. What methods will you use? You’ll need a way to measure the success of your promotion. Will it be based the number of new followers you get or maybe how many retweets your article explaining the promotion gets? How will you keep track of new followers, retweets, hashtags, etc? Will you use an online tool like OneKontest or Wildfire to manage your contest?

All of these details need to be worked out and defined before you begin your promotion.

Pick a Method

Let’s go into a little more detail about how you’ll measure the success of your promotion. You’ll need to pick a metric to be measured. The best methods for spreading the word and measuring the success of a Twitter promotion are:

• Requiring users to follow your account. You can offer a special prize to the first 100, 500 or 1000 users. Alternately, you can also offer something special to every 100th, 500th, or 1000th user that followers you. The numbers you use are of course up to you, but these are the most commonly used.
• Requiring a retweet of an article or blog post. You could create a blog post explaining the promotion and then require that people retweet it in order to enter. This is a great way to get the word out on Twitter; a great giveaway is sure to get lots of retweets.
• Requiring the use of a hashtag. Come up with a creative hashtag and require users to add it to an original tweet about your product, company or promotion. This is also a great way to get the word out.
• Requiring a retweet and hashtag. This is the best of both worlds and the most commonly used method.

Choose Your Prize

Now, what will you offer users who follow, retweet or use your hashtag? You will need to choose your prize wisely. Even though everyone loves freebies, it’s still important to make the item worth their while. Some very popular options include: gift cards, free shipping, free samples, promotion codes for apps, and service subscriptions (1, 3 or even 6 months free it’s up to you). Budget is an important thing to keep in mind. You don’t want to promise something that you can’t afford.

Add it All Up

Whichever method you choose, be sure that you’ll be able to accurately keep track of who is participating. It will be a huge pain to count hashtags, but a retweet button lets you know exactly how many people have retweeted the item. As long as you make a note of how many followers you had before you started, this method is a piece of cake with a little subtraction.
Of course, you could always just use one of the Twitter contest tools mentioned above; it will do all of the hard work for you.

Success

You’ve executed your marketing plan, you’ve gotten the word out, people are participating and word is spreading, sales are increasing, so that could only mean one thing – your Twitter promotion is a success! Following these steps you’ll be well on your way to reaping the benefits and getting the most out of your Twitter promotion. Remember, it’s about about proper planning and execution. Good luck!

This was a post by Lior who works for Kitchen Stools Direct, a bar stools and kitchen stools online brand.