This is how many followers I could gain on Twitter for $25
Last week I tried to run a sweepstake or contest to see how many followers I could gain on Twitter.
The concept was simple, people would be able to answer for a chance to win the $25 by following me and retweeting my tweet.
Now, knowing myself and who I am as a consumer, I thought this would be a phenomenal idea because frankly who doesn’t want 25 free dollars for performing such simple tasks.
So going into this I was expecting a tremendous amount of results. spoiler alert, I was sadly mistaken.
In addition to the sweepstakes tweet, I also promoted the tweet for a full day for $50, so right out of the gate I’m down at least $75 but in my mind, I thought with the expected amount of new followers I was going to gain would be well worth the investment.
Although the logic seemed airtight (cough) I would be proven wrong.
So here I go all excited envisioning ending the day with at least a hundred new followers if not more.
Going Viral!
I write the tweet explaining the rules on how to be entered in the contest then I hit the beautiful yellow promote button that Twitter throws in your face after any tweet since they make it seem as though you’re one click away from going viral.
Shortly after launching the tweet, like a kid on Christmas morning, I’m staring at the Tweet Analytics and seeing the Impressions more or less skyrocket, at least way more than what I’m accustomed to.
Some minutes go by, impressions are rising and I’m even seeing some retweets hit Analytics. At this point, after staring intently at the tweet analytics for a solid 7 1/2 minutes and three new followers later, I was certain that I was about 8 hours away from being verified on Twitter and receiving that ever-elusive blue check after starting the day with just 29 followers.
Things seemed to be going great, so I put my phone down and continued on with my day trying my best not to check my phone every 5 minutes.
Follower Count Going UP on a Tuesday (singing)
The next time I checked my phone I saw about 12 notifications of new followers on Twitter and my first thought immediately was “oh my God, this is actually working!”.
At this point, I decided to not look at my phone for the next hour and then check to see how many new followers I’ve gained.
Exactly one hour later is when the reality smacked me right across the face where I realized the engagement and the followers have flatlined or at least slowed down dramatically.
In my mind, I just kept thinking how could anyone not do such an easy task for $25? It’s literally two clicks for 25 bucks, so you’re basically getting paid $12.50 for a click or tap if you’re on your phone, which they probably were.
I mean, there are plenty of things I’m not particularly great at, but I didn’t think giving away money would be one of them. On second thought, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
Reality Strikes on how many followers I could gain on Twitter
It’s at this point where are all the Gary Vee content I’ve consumed in the past year hit me like a ton of bricks.
The two main points I realized were:
- Stop looking for the fast route to an end goal
- Secondly, to truly gain followers you need to create relationships and build a sense of community.
I think now, after the fact, this is where you’ll gain valuable followers and or fans.
Come to think of it, the sweepstakes contest in layman’s terms was literally just me saying I will pay you $25 to follow me.
So really I’m just gaining followers who may not have any interest in my content and will likely unfollow me at some point down the line because of that.
Conclusion
All in all, it was a good learning experience and a great teaching moment.
If you ever think about offering money in an attempt to gain followers on Twitter or on social media in general, that money will be better spent elsewhere.
I now focus my time on finding people on social media chatting about relevant topics where I can hopefully provide value to them.
As I continue to learn and try new things I will continue to write about my experiences and hopefully, anyone reading this can learn from my experiences and try something else or try to do what I did better and hopefully you’ll get better results.
Originally published at https://deecdigitalsolutions.com on November 12, 2020.
