Twitter Increasingly Used to Promote Contests

Much has been made about Twitter and the various uses for the service, ranging from sending out droll updates to friends to businesses using the microblogging service to get a better handle on customer-service issues. Now, a new trend is emerging on the platform, which could play into efforts to develop a business model.

As reported in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, the "buzz-generating" value of Twitter is increasingly being pared with the proven benefits of contests to increase brand awareness. As an example, Moonfruit, a London-based Web-design firm, added 47,000 followers and increased its Web site traffic by 1300 percent by using Twitter to promote a 10th-anniversary contest. The contest used "tweets" as its entry method, with entrants only required to place the #Moonfruit "hashtag" somewhere in the tweet.

As a result of the campaign, Moonfruit says its paying customers have increased by 20 percent and the number of trial users has grown more than three fold. One important thing companies using Twitter to promote contests have found is that while they're great at initially luring people as followers, companies must make a concerted and continual effort to keep them engaged or traffic will fall off precipitously once the promotional period has ended.