Social Media

Do incentives work?

posted by Jason Fleck @ February 25th, 2009

Earlier today, I was directed - on Twitter - toward a contest at Smashing Magazine. However, this contest wasn’t your typical contest.  Like usual, there were decent prizes offered, but to enter, you had to comment below the post with your location and what the weather was like outside. Still nothing earth shattering, right?

Well, the catch to this contest was Smashing Magazine wouldn’t give away any of their prizes until their comment count reached 5000 entries.  Let me tell you, that’s A LOT of entries. Right now, it’s over 8100 entries which is over 81 pages of comments. I can honestly tell you I’ve never seen so many comments on one post.

Result? They’ve probably pulled in more readers, more subscribers, and more ad revenue off that single blog post than the combined cost of the three prizes. Mission successful? I do believe so, yes.

Another example of a successful incentive campaign is the ShoeMoney Twitter contest. In this contest, Jeremy Schoemaker offered entrance to his contest by following him on Twitter and sending out a simple tweet:

Just entered to win a flip minoHD. Just follow @shoemoney and retweet. http://xr.com/fliphd”

What were his prizes? 2 flip mino’s and a possible MacBook Air if his follower count surpassed 20k. His follower count never hit 20k, but he did get over 6k followers in under 3 weeks. Mission successful? Most definitely.

The moral behind these two examples is that it doesn’t take something with a large monetary value like a car to motivate people to spread your cause. Sometimes all it takes is a fun gadget and some imagination.

Are there any other cool contests going on right now? Let me know by commenting below.

Related tags: contest • incentives • Social Media

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