Twitter has finally posted their guidelines for running a contest on their service. This will allow you to promote your giveaway without breaking any of Twitter’s posting rules.
Businesses, organizations, and even some swanky individuals have hosted contests through their Twitter profile. Contests on Twitter may offer prizes for tweeting a particular update, for following a particular user, or for posting updates with a specific hashtag.
Maybe you’ve been thinking about hosting a contest using your Twitter profile? You probably also want to make sure your contest doesn’t ask anyone to violate any of Twitter’s rules or guidelines.
Great! Here are some simple guidelines for running contests on Twitter:
- Discourage the creation of multiple accounts: If users make lots of accounts in order to enter a contest more than once, they’re liable to get all of their accounts suspended. Please be sure to include a rule stating that anyone found to use multiple accounts to enter will be ineligible.
- Discourage posting the same tweet over and over (and over) again: Posting duplicate, or near duplicate, updates or links is a violation of the Twitter Rules and jeopardizes search quality. Please don’t set rules to encourage lots of duplicate updates (like saying, “whoever retweets this the most wins”). Your contest could cause users to be automatically filtered out of Twitter search. Plus, instead of their followers seeing your cool contest, their followers might start getting annoyed by your contest. You might want to set a clear contest rule stating that multiple entries in a single day will not be accepted.
- Ask users to include an @reply to you in their update so you can see all the entries: When it comes to picking a winner, you’ll want to see all the contestants. If the updates include @username mention to you, you’ll be able to see all the updates in your Mentions timeline (see here for more information on replies and mentions). Just doing a public search may not show every single update, and some contestants may be filtered from search for quality.
- Encourage the use of topics relevant to the contest: You might decide to have users include relevant hashtag topics along with the updates (like #contest or #yourcompanyname). Keep in mind that hashtag topics need to be relevant to the update; encouraging users to add your hashtag to totally unrelated updates might cause them to violate the Twitter Rules.
These guidelines should help keep your contest entrants in good standing. In general, make sure you review both the Twitter Rules and our search best practices before starting your contest. If you’re a business on Twitter, you might also want to check out the Twitter 101 for Business guide for more information and tips.
November 6th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
This is very useful information. Thank you. After having been filtered at least twice myself, anything that I can do to avoid this is wonderful.
January 2nd, 2010 at 5:33 pm
[...] make sure you don’t run foul of the rules. Check out this post on Contest Queen which details these [...]