Moonfruit, an online website design company, advertised 10 MacBook giveaways in 10 days if you follow their Twitter feed @Moontweet and tweet using their hashtag #moonfruit. #moonfruit has been on top of the Twitter trends for four straight days, and Moonfruit can boast an average of over 10,000 new followers per day from this promotion:

Twitter Contests for Building a Local Following

The same contest frenzy can be applied to local businesses for the same reasons people put their business cards into a jar; they want a chance to win!

First step if you’re a local business: Follow local community Twitterers using local Twitter resources like Localtweeps.com, Chirpcity.com and Breaking News city sites, and Twitter directories that encourage local city tagging like Twellow.com or WeFollow.com. Once you follow them, you create a simple contest campaign so they will be attracted to following you back:

Restaurants

The free dinner for two weekly drawing works exactly like “put your business card in a jar”.

Retail

Use special coupon applications like TwtQpon.com to create Twitter coupons:

Use events like birthdays, graduation, Christmas or April 15 to tweet topical gift or service ideas. Consumers search for “graduation gifts” on Twitter too.