Hope This Twitter Competition Doesn’t Take Off

We’ve focused a lot of this blog on Facebook competitions lately and overlooked the fact that Twitter also has it’s fair share of issues. There are still question marks about how winners are picked, mutliple entries and running good interactive competitions. Examples of competitions that aren’t good are always worth sharing – firstly it makes the comper aware of things to look out for and it also helps promoters run better competitions. And here’s a good example of how not to run a Twitter competition!

Longest Hashtag Ever

Tweet & Tweet & Tweet

Manchester Airport would like entrants to tweet and tweet and tweet about flying from Manchester Airport to Edinburgh. In order to enter they have to make tweets containing #IwannaflyfromMan2EdinburghwithBMI. Firstly the length of the hashtag is a bit silly, but secondly it’s simply asking people to spam Twitter – and yes, there are people who will do it. More importantly though the mechanic of this competition is in our view outside Twitter Contest Guidelines. Twitter advise that “posting duplicate, or near duplicate, updates or links is a violation of the Twitter Rules and jeopardizes search quality”. They then kindly ask that brands “don’t set rules to encourage lots of duplicate updates (like saying, whoever retweets this the most wins)”.

We’ll This Take Off?

Now, we’ve messaged Manchester Airport and will see whether they decide to change their competition or continue encouraging their followers to spam their own timelines for the sake of a couple of flights. Let’s hope they decide to ground this competition format and take off with a better idea.