Increase Your Twitter Followers With a Contest

Twitter is a terrific way to meet and communicate with potential book customers as well as influencers who can spread the word about your book. In today's guest post Tony Eldridge, author of Conducting Effective Twitter Contests, shares some tips for using contests to increase your Twitter followers.

Contests are a very popular way of gaining subscribers. In Twitter, followers are the equivalent of subscribers. In this post, I want to discuss how to perform a successful Twitter contest. This is something that I did which primed my Twitter follower base with targeted followers. Once you gain a threshold of followers, your list can continue to grow on its own, as long as you put out good, relevant, and useful tweets.

Here are some things to keep in mind when you decide to start a Twitter contest:

1.  Know your purpose for the contest – Are you trying to sell a product, service or book? Are you trying to add subscribers to a list other than Twitter? Are you trying to build your subscriber followers? In my opinion, you will achieve the most success with your Twitter contest if you focus on building your Twitter followers. If you can find the right followers, your contest will have lasting success.

2.  Give some thought as to the give-aways – What will be your prize? That is, what will be the carrot you use to get people to enter your contest? By picking the prizes that appeal specifically to your target audience, you will have a carrot that will produce great results.

3.  Don't go at it alone – Here is a mistake that many people make when running Twitter contests designed to increase their follower base: They try to do everything themselves. If you craft your contest to give others a stake in it, you will motivate others to promote the contest for you and give you exposure to their followers.

4.  Have a plan in place to track your entries – One of the worst things you can do it to launch a great contest only to find a few days in that you forgot to set up a way to track those who are entering. With a little preparation, you can make sure you are ready to record every valid entry.

5.  Start early and stay organized – I bet there are more steps in conducting a successful Twitter contest than you think. Sure, you can wing it, but just like with anything of value, you will probably miss some opportunities by not planning like you should. If you give yourself time, you will be able to conduct a powerful contest without rushing through things.

Tony Eldridge is the author of the action-adventure novel, The Samson Effect, and author of the innovative video ebook, Conducting Effective Twitter Contests. On his Marketing Tips For Authors blog you can find practical advice on low cost and no-cost methods for marketing your book. Sign up for his free newsletter to get video tips to help you with some of the more technical aspects of marketing your book online.

Learn More About Using Twitter for Book Promotion

To learn more about how authors can use Twitter to promote themselves and their books, check out the Conducting Effective Twitter Contests ebook, Twitter Guide for Authors ebook and the Boost Your Book Sales With Twitter audio program.

Comments

[Buy facebook fans]

The issue is credibility and involvement. Twitter offers immediate feedback from verified sources at one place and one doesn't have to do a lot of moving around websites to find out particular information. But one of the biggest strengths of Twitter is that it provides more viral marketing as compared to Facebook, even though it lags behind in the number of users.
That said, Facebook, because of the sheer amount of details it allows to be posted, encourages user response and involvement, and with video and photo sharing, it takes the competition to a whole new level.