Promote Your Giveaway: Twitter

Got a Twitter account? Of course you do! Your business should be on Twitter; it’s a great way to connect with your customers, gather customer feedback, and is a great way to generate some buzz about your giveaway. In this section, you’ll learn how you can best promote your giveaway on Twitter.

Tweeting a message

A tweet is a 140-character message that you create and post on your Twitter account. It’s a public message that anyone can see, but will get the most visibility from those that follow your account on Twitter.

Promoting your giveaway on Twitter through a tweet is the easiest way to share your promotion with your followers. You can link anyone from a tweet to wherever you’re running your giveaway. Unlike a Facebook status update, you’ll need to pick and choose what you say carefully as you’re limited to 140 characters, which includes the 22 characters it typically takes to include a URL linking to the promotion.

Here are some other subjects you should be thinking about to help your giveaway receive more traffic through Twitter:

• What to include in your tweet. Unlike a Facebook status update, you don’t have much room in your tweet. You’ll have to prioritize what you include and what makes the cut. As you write your tweet, consider including the ARV (average retail value) of your prize. As always, use call-to-action messaging and try to discuss the prize that’s being given away.

• Pin your tweet. A recent change that Twitter put into place is the ability to pin any tweet that you’ve created to the top of your Twitter profile page. Consider leaving a tweet about your giveaway at the top of your profile, preferably with an image that includes some details about the promotion.

• Include images. Prior to last year, you weren’t able to tweet an image and have it appear in your feed. Now that Twitter has given you this ability, if you attach an image to your tweet, it’s likely you’ll see a significant lift in the amount of retweets and favorites your tweet receives.

• Use hashtags. Using hashtags in your tweet may help your tweet appear in relevant searches on Twitter. To decide what hashtags you should use, check out RiteTag or Tagboard for assistance. Don’t go crazy though! It’s a best practice to use no more than two hashtags per tweet. After two hashtags in a tweet, you’ll see a decrease in engagement.

• Use a tweet scheduler. During the course of your giveaway, you’ll send out a good handful of tweets, especially if your promotion lasts several months. This can take a lot of time, but thankfully, there are solutions out there that can help you keep your tweets better organized such as Buffer or HootSuite. Think about scheduling your tweets with these tools to better coordinate your giveaway’s promotion, particularly when it comes time to launch and end the giveaway.

• Update your profile’s header photo. Similar to your Facebook page’s cover photo, your Twitter profile’s header photo is prime real estate for promoting your giveaway. Outside the normal rules and policies in place, Twitter doesn’t have any restrictions as to what your header photo shows.

Have a great Twitter profile

While the tips above should help your giveaway, running a great / healthy Twitter account will only help your promotions be more successful. Here’s a curated list of other compelling blog posts and materials about Twitter marketing that you should find helpful:

• How Twitter’s Expanded Images Increase Clicks, Retweets and Favorites [New Data]

• Why You Should Use Images on Twitter and 3 Tips to Doing it Right

• A/B Test Finds 55% Increase in Leads When Images Added to Tweets [New Data]

• A Scientific Guide to Hashtags: How Many, Which Ones, and Where to Use Them

• How to Use Hashtags on Twitter: A Simple Guide for Marketers

• 13 Eye-Catching Examples of Twitter's New Header Images

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Next: Learn best practices surrounding promoting your giveaway on Pinterest