If you’ve been on Twitter for a while, there’s a good chance you’ve come across a tweet that asked you to retweet something (usually a link to a spammy-looking site) for the chance to enter a contest. Of course, these are typically bogus, leading many people to simply ignore them. And that poses a problem to the companies who really are trying to run sweepstakes on Twitter, who can have a hard time proving their legitimacy. Wildfire, a platform for building viral marketing campaigns, is looking to help: the company has just launched support for sweepstakes on Twitter, allowing brands to now manage campaigns across their websites, Facebook, and Twitter simultaneously.
Wildfire hasn’t been around very long, but it’s already accomplished quite a bit: it won last year’s fbFund, and has built up a very impressive roster of clients, including Pepsi, Sony, CNN, Universal, AT&T, VIctoria’s Secret and even Facebook itself, which has used the service for multiple campaigns. But until now, it hasn’t been available for Twitter.
From the user perspective, a Wildfire sweepstakes that’s being run on Twitter is very straightforward: clicking a contest link will take you to a basic sweepstakes form, which includes a pre-populated Tweet that will alert your followers that you’ve just signed up for the contest. Tweet that out, and you’re presented with another quick form where you fill out your name and contact information, so you can be reached if you win. The contest format is built to encourage virality — for every one of your followers that signs up for the sweepstakes via the link you tweeted out, you’re given an extra entry in the contest. This gives users with a lot of followers a big incentive to tweet these contests, as they’ll have a good chance to boost their odds of winning. If you’d like to try out the experience for yourself, check out this sample contest.
Wildfire also tries to streamline the process for the company running the campaign. The platform uses a wizard to set up the sweepstakes microsite, which companies can then customize with their rules, opt-in newsletters, and the appearance. Companies can also prompt entrants to their sweepstakes to start following their official Twitter accounts, which makes it easy for them to build up a larger audience. On the backend, Wildfire allows clients to control their campaigns across all supported platforms (Facebook, the web, and Twitter), and also offers detailed analytics for each.
All in all this is a solid addition to Wildfire’s lineup — don’t be surprised if you start seeing major brands running campaigns on Twitter using the platform in the near future. And there will likely be plenty of smaller customers too, as Wildfire has been used by thousands of small businesses to run over 10,000 total campaigns.
Wildfire is a great example of a startup that recognized an opportunity, created a simple, focused and innovative solution within the sweet-spot of that opportunity time window.
Now they are well positioned to create paying customers and I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t start receiving acquisition offers at an increasing rate. (they likely have had a few already)
Congratulations to the Wildfire team.
Thanks Chris!
I wonder what the new FTC disclosure regulations are going to do to this model.
Isn’t the increased chance of winning due to one’s followers signing up a form of indirect compensation that needs to be disclosed? (In each tweet no less!)
Looks like a great contest platform. Although our contests are not run directly through twitter, this platform may help to further promote and advertise the contests that we run. Thanks for the post.
Thanks, Giancarlo! With Wildfire you are actually never limited to just one channel. If you want to run a sweepstakes, for example, you could run it simultaneously through Twitter, Facebook, and your website while collecting all of your entry data into one place, your Wildfire account.
good analysis Chris. Very cool how a company can create something simple but useful and really run with it.
Thanks, Monica. Our dev team has been working really hard to maximize utility while keeping things simple. They will definitely appreciate that
Thanks Jason! Many Wildfire customers have been asking for the ability to deliver a legitimate, structured sweepstakes through Twitter, so we listened to them
Let us know if you have any questions about running any kind of interactive promotion (including sweepstakes, photo/video/essay contests, coupons, virtual gifts, trivia, quizzes, and favorite items) on Twitter, Facebook, and your company’s website. Wildfire members have already run over 10,000 campaigns on our social media marketing platform, so we have a pretty good idea about what has worked well in the past, what would work best for your company in the future, and how to deliver the best experience possible to your customers through social media.
Brendan
Wildfire Team
http://wildfireapp.com
P.S. What do you think of our new website?
Thanks for the nice comments! Also, thanks to TC for the article.
Things are going well at the moment and we’re looking to hire a few rock star salespeople and ruby on rails developers.
If you’re interested in applying, send us your resume and cover letter at jobs@wildfireapp.com.
Cheers,
Derek Draper
Yeah! Also, if you are an experienced ruby-on-rails developer, we want to hear from you too.
Derek and team – Congrats on the a) the evolution of your services and b) the PR you’re getting from this all. Hope it generates substantial leads.
You really don’t need outbound sales people. That’s like paying extra to send sweepstakes offers out in the Sunday paper…
Inbound marketing could be profoundly effective for your company. Let’s get together and talk about the possibilities. PS. I have a great local resource for Ruby on Rails programmers for a carrot – we’re all about solving problems.
i like that idea. like a retweet contest or followers contest.
there’s a lot that you could do there.
Twitter sucks! What a joke.
Dammit! This was one of my ideas to pitch for Atlanta Startup Weekend. Crap…Oh well, better hope the others are winners
We love Wildfire! We use it for nearly all of our contests now. Simple to set up and use. Couldn’t be better.
Thanks Jason!
Answer to my prayers. I’ve looked at a handful of recent entries into the “make it easy to promote social stuff” – and they were all so expensive it was pretty ridiculous.
I signed up and created a sweepstakes promo to try and get our freshly created Helmet Camera Central Facebook Fan page some love!
http://www.face...app_28134323652
Thanks Wildfire!
Oh yeah – here’s the twitter promo too!
“Enter the HD For Your Head Sweepstakes for a chance to win a ContourHD 1080p Helmet Cam. Check it out here http://bit.ly/cQdVK”
The process was pretty intuitive, very affordable. We’ll see how the results are! The promo is over on Nov 15th – we started with a fresh Fan page today with 0 followers.
-chad
I think this is interesitng. Twitter needs to do something about the spammers. It ruins the experience
This application can be used to find the right job candidate in a non traditional way. Maybe even generate a little PR along the way.
Hold a contest for a job. Best candidate wins. Similar contest has been run for a wine expert blog position.