Blaise Grimes-Viort

Over the course of March 2010, we ran a daily giveaway on Twitter for two of our brands. Our goals were to increase our followers and raise engagement with the content we broadcast on Twitter.

Laura Murphy managed this initiative throughout and did a great job, providing us with real insight into what worked and what didn’t.

The results were as follows:

Increase in Followers:
Brand A: 54%, Brand B= 56%

Page Impression increase via Twitter referrals:
Brand A= 59%, Brand B= 36%

Over the course of the month, Brand A quickly overtook its closest competitor in terms of Twitter followers, while Brand B caught up substancially.

Apart from demonstrating the value of cultivating an engaged and targeted following on Twitter, the process taught us a lot about how to go about running a giveaway successfully and maximising the effect of our efforts.

How did we go about achieving such great results? As usual, good planning, regular assessments and a flexible approach worked best.

Mobilise, organise, analyse

To run a daily giveaway or competition on Twitter or any other Social Media Network like Facebook, you need prizes. ‘But I can’t afford expensive prizes like iPods and holidays!” I hear you cry; you’d be amazed at how many entrants we had for our box of chocolates compared to some of our other seemingly more desirable prizes. Decide what what you are going to give away, aiming to have as many of these confirmed before starting to save you the panic of running out and not sourcing more later when you need them.

This leads us nicely to the second point; analyse till you are blue in the face. You will want to track the metrics that are valuable to you or you won’t be able to write a fancy blog post or internal report like mine about Social Media ROI afterwards.

The devil is in the detail

I doubt we’d been as successful if we hadn’t continually evolved our activity to make the giveaway into one that covered all the angles.

Whether it’s using the giveaway item brand’s username in the original tweet to notify them and hopefully get a retweet, to tracking which prizes were doing better than others in order to learn about our followers, we actioned learnings from the initiative as we went along.

And if one of your goals is to get people onto your site, don’t forget to link to it via a call to action, making sure the page linked to is an effective one in enticing your followers further into your site.

Remember your role as Master of Ceremony

Whether you are a Social Media Manager or a Community Manager, part of your role will be to engage followers and make the experience of taking part a fun and memorable one. You could just rely on the prizes to draw people in (and most likely lose them when the dust settles), or you can show them the value of keeping in touch with your brand.

Developing a process of engagement is vital in ensuring your success is not temporary. Look at how big competitions are run, like the State Lottery.

Advertise your prizes in advance, show people visually what they could be winning, and try to build up anticipation throughout the day. Follow up excited @replies, and save your best prizes till last.

And of course, the reason we are here

Hopefully you will have whipped your followers up into a frenzy and be gaining new ones by the digital bucket-load. In all the excitement, don’t forget to attend to the basics like a pro.

This could be checking both the new Twitter Retweets as well as the old @reply ones, or ensuring you are following your winners so they can Direct Message you, which is easily forgotten in the heat of the moment.

Every time you forget to attend to one of the fundamentals, you will lose a tiny fraction of your trust. As a one-off this is harmless, but those gargantuan people you occasionally see on TV put it best: a cake a day seems manageable until it creeps up on you one day and you need a winch just to get out of bed.

Your followers’ trust is vital to your brand’s success in Social Media. Don’t squander it on avoidable little mistakes.

Do you have any similar success stories that you can share? Do you find your Social Media activity’s ROI easy to demonstrate?

[photo by hectorir]