Part One: What’s a “Follow Contest“?
No, it’s not a competition to see who is the best at imitating sheep. Sorry. 
It’s a contest where a person is entered to win a sweepstakes or contest, in exchange for following a social presence account like those you’d find on Twitter or Jaiku. There are several advantages of this to the person entering, which makes the barrier to enter much lower than a more traditional angle, even lower than the JV Giveaway and Join contest.
- Those entering the contest don’t have to expose their information,
- They can easily join using a platform they’re already familiar with (since you target users on a particular platform it’s not like they have to do anything new), and,
- They can just as easily opt-out.
If you have a physical product, here’s one implementation using Twitter: Sponsor a Contest | Follow To Win. It seems like it would work best for companies introducing new products that have mass consumer appeal.
The basic idea is this: the site, Follow to Win, has set up a Twitter account, and is building an audience. Their tactic is to enter people in giveaways in exchange for those folks following their account, and tweeting about the fact that they did so.
Part Two: Should You Sponsor a Commercial Follow Contest?
Hm. Maybe, maybe not.
Peter Cashmore, CEO of Mashable, asked how Tweeters felt about it through his Mashable Twitter account this weekend. Yes, idea is innovative, but is it appropriate for Twitter?
If you go by folks in the general Follow to Win Twitter search the reactions lean more towards people who think it’s okay, or at least not enough of a nuisance to be disruptive. Most of the people in the Mashable stream of replies to Pete’s query say it encourages, or flat out is, Twitter spam.
While it’s true that it may rub the Twitter purist the wrong way, it’s also important to weigh the consumer side who may be all too happy for the chance to get something for nothing. After all, it’s clear that some people are at least interested in it; since the account’s first tweet on January 27th, they have 418 followers at last count.
You also want to gauge your own audience — not everyone uses Twitter the same way, and the people that have similar uses for it tend to cluster.
We’ll going to come back to how to adapt this model to your business, shortly.
For now, let’s look beyond the controversy for a moment, and look at how this would work if it was successful. All things being equal, if the general Twitter public liked the idea of Follow to Win and signed up, and you paid to sponsor this contest, here’s how you’d benefit:
- Awareness level of your product increasing as the existing Follow to Win audience came back to find out what the new contest is,
- Spread of your product and brand beyond the Follow to Win crowd as each new person who entered tweeted to their own audience about it
- Potentially a third wave of interest as the winner was announced, especially if they really loved the prize when they got it.
Now let’s take those benefits, get rid of the negatives, and make it work for your business.
Part Three: A Follow Contest Recipe For Your Business
Ingredients:
- An existing audience at a site where people can follow you or the ability to generate one, using, say, a message to your newsletter list. Twitter, and Facebook come immediately to mind.
- A way for them to share their action with like-minded people.A status update on Facebook may be less obtrusive. If you held it on Twitter, you could present the option of using any other site where links can publicly be spread and categorized, to be unobtrusive to people not interested. This would also bring you much more targeted traffic. (Imagine 128 people adding your link to Delicious in one day.)
- A prize to giveaway that is highly desirable to this group
Preparation:
Essentially, you’d do the same thing Follow to Win is doing: build the audience, then offer them chances to win periodic prizes in exchange for their attention. You’re just going to
- tweak it to fit your business,
- be the only “sponsor”, and,
- remove all the irritants that could get in the way
So find out what your people want, create a prize or offer one from your current product line. Announce it, publicize it, use it to grow your followers or enhance the experience of existing followers on social media sites.
A contest might be just the thing to spark conversation, or raise awareness of new products. I’ll give you a few more pointers in the next post.
