In today’s tutorial we will see one of the ways to do a giveaway on Twitter. First collecting data and then choosing the winner.
As a result of what we did yesterday, many listeners, readers and followers have asked me and have shown some interest in how to make a selection of tweets, and the choice of the winner.
As I say, there are many ways to do it, including some websites that are dedicated to it. In this case I will tell you how I do it both on this occasion and for my clients.
Follow Twitter rules
The first and most important thing is to follow your , which in summary are these four points:
- Do not encourage the creation of multiple accounts. That is why one of the rules of the draw was that it had to be an account created in October at most.
- Do not encourage the publication of repeated Tweets. Hence, I did not tell you the message you had to write, nor did I ask you to retweet, but I encouraged you to be original.
- Ask users to include an @reply in updates so you can see all posts. This is completely logical, and that is why I asked you to mention me in the Tweeet with my username @joanboluda. To receive ALL mentions and not miss a single tweet.
- Encourage the use of hashtags relevant to the contest. Once again, that’s why I asked you to use the hashtag #1000euros.
As you can see, we comply with everything with very basic rules. If you do a contest of these characteristics, I advise you to keep it as simple as possible.
promote the contest
The next step will obviously be to launch and promote the contest. That would already deserve a separate tutorial, since it will depend on many factors.
In my case, what I did was announce it in my . My current audience is over 7,000 people, more than enough to generate the desired “snowball” effect. Also, in podcasting, unlike some social networks, the audience is very appreciative and always willing to help. In plain words, they are a solete. (Thanks guys!) I’ll talk more about this on Monday, in the results analysis.
If you don’t have a podcast or an audience, you can go to your readers, followers, fan, circles or even through . And if you don’t have anything, you only have the option to do it through Facebook Ads (watch ) or Twitter Ads.
In any case, yours is to reach a minimum critical mass of people to be able to generate the viral effect. If you don’t advertise the contest to that minimum number of people, it simply won’t spread, or it will be much more difficult.
Collect the Tweets that have participated in the contest
Once the users have participated by making their tweets, we must collect them all to proceed to the draw. One option is to do it manually, simply, and taking note of all those tweets one by one. But of course, if the participation is high, you are going to spend a week doing that, and that is why there are several tools that take care of it.
One of these tools is , which allows you to collect, store and export all the data related to your account. Tweets, retweets, mentions, replies, followers… Everything is stored in your account, to later use it whenever and however you want, either with the generated reports, or by exporting to Excel or CSV and treating it as a spreadsheet. Take, for example, the report of followers gained during the contest:
Of course, it is important to sign up for this tool BEFORE doing the draw, since it will only start saving that data from that moment on. In other words, you cannot have data retroactively.
But if you want something simpler, that does not require a subscription, you can use , a web application that allows you to export all kinds of data from your Twitter account. Of course, the results are limited to the tops of Twitter. In the case of @mentionsto 800 of them, and as for the #hashtagto 3,200 of the last 7 days.
The first thing we have to do is connect the application with Twitter, and then choose what we want to export:
Next, the system will inform you of how many tweets meet these data, and will allow you to choose whether to export it to Excel, Calc, CSV or even HTML.
This service is free for the first 50 tweets, and thereafter you must pay based on the number of tweets. In the case of the #1000euros draw, as there were more than 3,200 tweets (more than double) this system did not work. But for many occasions it can be a more than enough tool.
There are other tools, like or , that do similar things, and obviously, with the same limits. You can take a look and choose the one you like the most 🙂 In any case, in the end you will end up with a list similar to this one:
This file has multiple columns, with the following information public of the participants: Date of the tweet, user, name, language, location, followers, following, registration date, description, link to the tweet, how many retweets it has had, and how many favorites.
From there, we have two options. The first is cleaning a priori, that is, check that each row complies with the norms. The other is to do a posteriori, that is, carry out the draw, and if it does not comply with the rules, it is discarded and drawn again. I personally do a priori cleaning.
In my case, and for the most curious, this is the first tweet that participated in the contest, probably while I was listening to the episode, since it was 07:14…
How? What draws? Well, that doesn’t sound bad! These contests are cool! He participated!
— Toni Mira-Perceval (@TmirapercevalG)
And this the last one, who entered by the hair, 5 seconds from the end of the contest.
I want to participate
— Ricardo Esteban (@ricardojeg)
We can know all this thanks to Excel, in which we can see the exact hour, minutes and seconds. In this case, I was also interested in knowing the user’s registration date on Twitter, to ensure that it was not an account created for the occasion.
It seems that everything is ready to choose the winner, right? Well no. Before, there is something that we should always do before. Remove duplicate users.
remove duplicates
Before going on to choose a winner, we must remove the duplicates, to prevent the same user from appearing on more than one occasion because they have published several tweets.
We can do this with Excel, but there are also faster options, such as the “Remove Duplicate Lines” tool from .
There we must copy and paste the names of the “user” column, and click on the button. And it will automatically delete duplicate users, leaving only one of each. And now yes, we will have a list of participants.
choose the winner
No less important is the choice of the winner. How can we do it in a fair, random, reliable and simple way? Easy! With a very useful free tool called , from Miniwebtool. We just have to copy the list of winners and paste it in the text box:
As you can see in the image, we just have to paste the list of names and hit the “Pick a Random Name” button and that’s it. The winner will appear below. Easy, simple and fast.
If you are going to do it like this, I advise you to record the draw with a screen capture software, such as ScreenFlow or Camtasia. Although you can also do it by sharing the screen with Google Hangouts, or with Quicktime.
Summary and conclusion
To run a contest on Twitter, we must read its rules, define a contest according to them, communicate it as best we can, export the results, and do a random draw.
Or you already know. Take a look at all those tools, and make good use of them. If you have any questions, you already know that you can contact me through the contact tab of the .
And now I’m going back to continue analyzing the results of the €1000 contest, which on Monday we will publish a very complete report, and before that I also want to prepare another tutorial for tomorrow. Until then… Very good morning!
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