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| | The ABHP - A Bit of Humble Pie Network is not currently active and cannot accept new posts | | Twitter Retweet Went Away! | Views: 386 | | Dec 03, 2009 5:19 am | | Twitter Retweet Went Away! | # | 
Kurt Schweitzer | | Right after Thanksgiving I discovered a giveaway contest that another scooter dealer was having. I thought it was such a great idea that I immediately implemented my own.
One part of the contest makes use of Twitter's Retweet mechanism to "go viral".
This evening an interesting thing happened to my contest - it "went viral" (in a small but noticeable way). What happened was around 10 pm EST I started putting together the list for this evening's drawing. The number of entries was down from yesterday, so I sent out a reminder note: " Still a couple hours left before the Day 3 drawing. Get your entry in now!"
That was posted on the Urban Village Scooters page on Facebook. I have Facebook and Twitter cross-connected, however, so that a post on either one gets copied to the other.
Somebody (and yes, I think I know who!) picked it up on Twitter, followed the link to Facebook, found the entry text on the page, and posted the entry text back on Twitter. The text was "Day 3 of the @uvscooters Holiday Giveaway! RT this tweet to enter! http://ow.ly/GZE1 ".
This is where it went viral - this post matches a #giveaway search on Twitter, and at 10 pm EST (7 pm PST) a LOT of people were searching on that term.
I got hit with 16 entries in less than five minutes, from all across the country. Many of them within the same minute!
As is my practice I went to the contest entrants' pages, just to get a feel of what their interests are. Most of them seem to be "professional contest entrants" - all their posts were contest entries.
If you think about it, this is painfully easy to do. Just do a search on #giveaway, or #drawing, or #contest, and just go down the list hitting the Retweet button.
Twitter seems to be on top of this - they've removed the Retweet button, presumably to cut down on the load this sort of contest activity places on their servers.
People who use third-party tools, however, still have it. At least HootSuite still does.
Anyway, this has me rethinking the contest. I may stop accepting Twitter entries, or something. Or do something to make it clear that "Free Gift" doesn't include free shipping!Private Reply to Kurt Schweitzer | | |
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