I've written before about running competitions for link building, but given the increasingly important role of Twitter in online marketing and SEO, it's time to address a popular mechanic: Twitter competitions.
 
Historically, there were two particular reasons to run competitions through Twitter: firstly to increase the number of followers (and hence, the influence) of a Twitter account. The other important reason was usually branding: a competition that successfully 'goes viral' would introduce the brand and the website to huge numbers of new people.
 
However, now that social media data is used by search engines and appears to have some influence in their rankings, sites like Twitter are no longer just an adjunct to search marketing - but must be a part of SEO strategy.
 
Various posts abound with guidance for running a competition on the site, including from Mashable and Social Mouths. These focus mainly on the 'older reasons' for running a competition, but the workflow is still similar: define the prize, the start & end dates and - crucially - the entry mechanism.
 
The method of entering might be one of:
  • following a particular account
  • mentioning the account name in a tweet
  • using a particular hashtag in a tweet
  • retweeting a whole message
 
At the most basic level, if we're actually going to get any SEO value from the competition, then we need the entrants to include a link to a particular page on the site, which leads us to:
 
Tip 1: People should link to the site from their tweet as a way of entering the competition.
 
Great, now we're getting on Google's radar with some social links to our site. You could implement this by giving people an exact tweet to copy and paste, but the requirements could be as simple as having to mention the company twitter account and a given URL in your tweet to be entered.
 
Links to the site are good, but if this competition is going to generate a real rankings bump for the linked page, then it makes sense to put this weight behind a real landing page. This could be done by tying the giveaway into a particular product or category from the site, then putting the promotion instructions on that product landing page, and making *that* the page that people should link to in their tweets.
 
Tip 2: A landing page from the site should also carry the competition information, and be the page that entrants link to.
 
After the competition has ended, this page will have the benefit of any weblinks / social links generated during the competition. (In addition, doing this keeps you white hat and above board - in contrast to the 'bait and switch' pulled by some sites who run a competition or publish link bait on a URL which is later 301ed to a commercial landing page - leaving lots of sites unwittingly linking to pages that they never intended to.)
 
You can see this tactic in use at the moment by Food Service Warehouse, they're running a bar supplies competition, right there on the related category page.
 
Food Service Warehouse screenshot
 
 
On a related note: if you're getting hundreds of people to link to a page for you, it'd be a shame not to take advantage of getting targetted anchor text as well. One way to do this is to make sure that the competition has a name that you'll be happy with people using to link to it
 
In an old post about getting domain diversity and good anchor text, I made two recommendations that could be useful here: firstly give the competition a name that will benefit you when people link to the competion.
 
 
These giveaways from Nordstrom were branded differently - the second giveaway in the list received richer anchor text from links than the one show above.
 
A second suggestion - which is particularly relevant to running a promotion on Twitter - is to take advantage of using a short URL with keywords in it. For example, the competition above could have used https://bit.ly/bartending-set instead, to get some keyword rich links.
 
Tip 3: Get good anchor text by using a relevant name for the promotion, and using keyword-rich short URLs.
 
 
When it comes to promoting the sweepstake, the first people to reach out to are Twitter users that are interested in the type of prize that you're giving away.
 
Tip 4: Search for relevant Twitter users, to tell them about the promotion.
 
You can search for people by interest on Twitter - type a phrase into search, then click on the 'People' tab. For example: people on Twitter with an interest in 'home brewing'.
 
Alternatively, FollowerWonk is a third-party service that does a brilliant job of mining Twitter user data to find appropriate people to talk to.
 
FollowerWonk's list of users interested in 'home brewing'
 
NB: if you're logged into FollowerWonk with the account you're promoting, it'll also tell you which of the listed users already follow you.
 
There are various resources that go into depth about doing outreach via Twitter. It's unnecessary for me to cover that again now, suffice to say: please don't be a spammer! You're running these promotions to help your brand and SEO; this is no time to ruin the company's reputation.
 
Beyond doing outreach to relevant Twitter users, it's also appropriate to do regular link building, and traditional online outreach to appropriate webmasters / bloggers. This step shouldn't be overlooked, as promoting a good giveaway should be easier and more effective than trying to get links to any kind of commercial content. Which leads us to:
 
Tip 5: Just because the sweepstake relies on Twitter as a mechanic, you can still do traditional link building.
 
The sweepstake niche also has a lot of dedicated directories and listing services that you can submit to. These might be good for SEO, but are usually excellent at sending large numbers of people who can enter the competition (and in the process, promote the Twitter account and create social links to the site.)
 
As well as the sites I listed on this post, sites like CompetitionHunter.com, SweepsAdvantage and Online-Sweepstakes are worth looking at. (The latter sent very healthy traffic to a competition we recently ran, when the giveaway was added to the site by a member.)
 
While all this is going on, you'll be able to see entrants mentioning the company account name in the @replies tab or Twitter's internal search. However, this information isn't easy to parse and will disappear relatively soon. 
 
Tip 6: Monitor discussion of & entries to the giveaway while it's in process, and record this data for use later on.
 
It's worth using a service that will monitor and record all this on your behalf. Right now, Distilled is using Rowfeeder, and I'd definitely recommend it.
 
The service monitors Twitter for particular account names and hashtags, stores all those tweets for you, creates useful charts/graphs and (perhaps the simplest feature, but one that I really like) will dump all the information into a Google Docs spreadsheet for you, in real time.
 
Depending on how the promotion is run, this data might be useful while it's in progress - e.g.: to track the viral spread around the country / the world (since RowFeeder stores user location if it's available) - but it's worth storing the data to process after the event. In fact, that should probably be a tip as well:
 
Tip 7: After the promotion, analyze the people who entered or mentioned it on Twitter; look for any relationships that could be nurtured.
 
An example here would be to look for the most prominent users that entered, or any entrants who are particularly influential in their niche. It would be worth sending them a message (via Twitter, email or otherwise) to properly introduce yourself, and try to foster a relationship with them.
 
 

I expect we're about to see increased interest in Twitter competitions in the next few months (and the same could be said for Facebook promotions that are aimed at getting SEO benefit, though that's another post) - I hope these tips help you stay ahead of the pack and make sure you get as much SEO-bang-for-your-buck as possible.