When is a competition not a competition?

This morning I was intrigued to log in to Twitter and see that the top trending topic was #WinFootyTickets even though I'd not heard of any such competition on Twitter. I know I sometimes miss things, but surely I would have heard about one that had so many entries it was the most popular topic in the world? (Well....the world according to Twitter anyway!)

So I clicked on the hashtag to take a closer look. What I saw was thousands and thousands of people all saying who they would like to win tickets to see, or why they would like to see them. None of them had included a promoter of any kind in their tweet, just their message and the hashtag #WinFootyTickets. Some had started to argue amongst themselves about which teams you could win tickets for, or whether the word "footy" in the hashtag was correct or should be replaced with "football" but not one of them seemed to know or care who was running the competition,  what the prizes actually were, when the competition closed or any of the info we compers would want before entering.

Eventually my search took me to the Barclays Football Twitter feed, where they have a tweet advertising the competition that is running at their cashpoints and on their website, with Premiership tickets to be won every 90 minutes. If you are a Grape Vine reader, you will see it listed in the Long Running Comps section every month, and I'm sure most compers already know about it. If it is news to you, you can enter here and it is free to enter.

So why is it trending on Twitter and why do so many people think they have entered? Well, the Barclays Football tweet is a promoted one, which means that they have paid Twitter to pin it to the top of lots of relevant Twitter searches, so that if somebody goes to look for tweets about, say, football, it will be at the top of the list, and it will stay at the top. The tweet itself reads:

BarclaysFootyBarclays Football

77 Retweets

Try and win Barclays Premier League tickets, click http://drhb.me/q6K #WinFootyTickets #BPL please RT

20 JanFavoriteRetweetReply

Promoted by Barclays Football

 

As a comper, you can probably see right away that you need to click on the link to reach the competition, but today lots of non-compers must have seen that tweet and not realised it, thinking they could enter on Twitter.  Once they started tweeting about it, the hashtag will have started to appear more and more often until it hit the Trending Topic list, so now people are logging in to Twitter, seeing the hashtag appear in their Trending Topics list and tweeting about it straight away. They don't really know what competition they think they are entering, and the result is that they aren't entering any competition at all - a comp that is not a comp! The moral of the story is "Look before you Tweet">

 

Never mind, it's keeping them all busy while we compers head over to the Barclays website  and enter for real! Good luck everybody!