Every week we are starting to businesses grab the Twitter bull by the horns and jump on the wagon, so to speak. One particular marketing ‘novelty’ I keep coming across is the Twitter compeitions.

You could say that Twitter competition began with Ashton Kutcher challenging CNN to become the first profile with a million followers, the reward? Kushtor stated the millionth follower would recieve a copy of Guitar Hero, and both agreed that whoever won would donated 10,000 mosquito bed nets to charity for World Malaria Day.

Although not necessarily a marketing technique that the run of the mill business could employ, this highly publicised competition has still had a desired effect for both parties with CNN now having access to 2.5 million followers and Ashton Kuctcher a massive 3.5 million, showing the full force of Twitter and its possibilities.

An example of a local business utilising Twitter competition to increase brand awareness is Barrhead Travel, they recently ran a competition whereby tweeting #barrheadtravel would place you in the running to win a free holiday from the company. Similarily Dontstayin.com ran a competition offering followers the chance to win tickets to one of their events, all you had to do was talk about it.

Competitions are brilliant, not only are they fun but they give people are reason to do something thus if you plan it properly your competition can have excellent benefits. OF the competitions above both worked very well to increase the followership online and increase brand awareness within the Twitter community, however, competitions can be utilised to achieve a lot more than brand building- it can be a great means of getting customer feedback, getting creative inspiration, generating leads….

Some competitions ideas we would suggest:

Caption competition- get followers to post captions on Twitpic the best one winning the prize

Photography competition- submitting photographs via Twitter using the #hashtag

Write the best short story/poem/reason for winning in 140 characters

Posting a question & getting followers to DM the answer

Invite followers to provide feedback on service/product, randomly select a respondant

Make sure you get it right by talking about the competition, keep it fresh in your followers minds by talking about it, writing about it in a blog and linking to it; people can easily forget without meaning to and being in real time your initial competition announcement will quickly be replaced by another and then another.

Offer a good prize, don’t waste all your hard time and a good compeition idea on a prize that isn’t going to get the Followers salivating over.

Be as honest with your followers as possible, they know what the score is so don’t try and hide your objective of holding the competition- honesty is always the best policy. Speaking of which when it comes to the prize giving, stand true to your word and don’t be a stickler for handing the prize over in a timely manner.