Many companies have used Twitter as a medium for contests, which is fine. Some of those contests take the form of a “Retweet to win” contest, where folks become eligible by “retweeting” (reposting) a contest message to their followers. The theory is that those people then retweet, and it spreads in a viral nature. It sounds great in theory, until your Twitter friends list is filled with contest advertisements that you didn’t ask to see and your friends aren’t thinking about before posting.
When you’re participating in social media, it’s not about you. Stop, pause, and digest that: it’s not about you. This isn’t some crazy invention of mine; it’s what the leaders in online community management have been saying for quite a while. People like Dawn Foster and Tara Hunt. Tara likes to say to “turn the bullhorn around” and listen.
Let’s consider a couple different retweeting scenarios:
- In the first scenario, you have a contest, and tweet out a link to your promotional piece. You ask people to retweet to win, and that’s what happens. Think about their followers… did they subscribe to receive promotional material from third parties (in this case, you)?
- The other scenario is that you write great content (on Twitter, your blog, etc), tweet about it (without asking folks for a retweet), and see what happens. In general, good content will generate natural retweets. In this case, it’s your followers that are making the choice to retweet based on their own reasons and pass along your content to their followers.
In the first scenario, it’s all about you spreading your word. In the second scenario, it’s about your followers choosing to spread your word for you. Would you rather have non-coerced word of mouth?
Photo by heyitsRachel, used under Creative Commons licensing
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