I don’t usually enter competitions as the last thing that I won was a 40 yard dash at Butlins aged 4 and a bit. But I felt that over the last 2 and a half years that I have been on Twitter, I have really gone out of my way to help people get more from Twitter. I have done much of this for no money. This has taken the form of a free eBook, free daily tips, free surgeries, constantly answering Twitter related questions, free teleseminars and so on.

So, when I saw that there was a new award website called http://www.goldentwits.com/ just for people who have been fab on Twitter, I thought that I would enter myself and see if people would vote for me.

So, I started to mention to peeps, and the votes starting to come in. Now the clever bit, is that as people cast their votes, it suggests that they tweet out that message. The tweet looks something like this….

@markshaw you’ve got my vote in the #GoldenTwits http://www.goldentwits.com/user/markshaw

So how could this be made tons better?

Firstly encouraging people to spread the news that they have just done something to their followers on Twitter is a top idea. But in this instance, this message is called an @reply type of message. The only people that will automatically see that message are the sender, the person that they have voted for and anyone else that follows the both of us… Yes.. the both of us…So how could it be made better? I know that it will show up in the search.

You’ve got my vote @markshaw in the #GoldenTwits http://www.goldentwits.com/user/markshaw

This message is essentially the same except for the positioning of the @markshaw. Because it is not at the beginning, this is now not a @reply type of message. Now, the people that automatically get to see this message are the sender, the person that they have voted for and now all of the followers of the sender of the message. So this will make a huge difference to the number of people that get to see this message.

So What?

So if you are running a competition or simply want a message to be seen by the most number of people, then make sure that you dont have an @reply type of message as the tweet, but that you have it as a mention type of message. You will get a much greater amout of people viewing it.

If this has helped you, then please feel free to vote for me. The last thing I ever won was the 40 yard dash at Butlins aged 4 and a bit….http://www.goldentwits.com/user/markshaw