Twitter observation

Pinkzie

Hey everyone!

So, I've been entering competitions on Twitter for years, had some wins in that time but not a huge amount. Mostly, I have won low entry ones.
I made a tweet about a popular TV show last week, and had over 1,100 retweets & 5,000 likes.

When I clicked to view who had retweeted & liked, it only shows the last recent 25-50. There is no other way for me to see ALL of the retweets or likes. It just stops. The only way I could see the others was to scroll all the way through my main notification page, but with that many, it was just flooded and they were lost. Also overtaken by notifications nothing to do with the tweet.

This made me think of competitions, which very regularly get 1,000+ retweets Are all of us being seen? Now, I'm sure there is different ways in which companies draw their winners. Some may have a way of using an app/website to draw a winner. I'm going to try do that as an experiment to see if it does include ALL the people who interacted with my tweet. Hopefully that is the case.

The ones I'm more worried about are where the companies literally just look through the list of retweets and directly pick from that. That would mean the vast majority of entrants aren't visible.
I noticed last year, there were some accounts who were winning so, so much on Twitter, consistently and regularly, and what was common between all of them was they retweeted close to the end time, commented, quote retweeted, multiple times for the same competition.

It would make sense that these people would be in the most recent notifications, and also in the retweet list, which only show the most recent 50.
I've been "refreshing" my retweets on my profile to hopefully get back into the most recent list, and also making more of an effort to comment.

Any thoughts about this?

[Deleted User]

I've won a few Twitter competitions over the years, not many, but a few. 2 of those in particular I know I entered in the last half hour or so before it closed, only because I saw them just in time.

Pinkzie

[quote=[Deleted User];75860946]I've won a few Twitter competitions over the years, not many, but a few. 2 of those in particular I know I entered in the last half hour or so before it closed, only because I saw them just in time.[/QUOTE]

Thanks for replying!

I don't know what is the most common method companies use on Twitter to draw winners, but I imagine there is a variety of ways.

If they don't use some kind of random generator that includes all of the data new and old, I'm really worried most of us don't have a chance.

I was quite suprised that I couldn't see the whole list of retweets!

xoxlauraxox

I used to try and make an effort to enter twitter competitions at last min, never had any luck so I still enter on the off chance but just think its rubbish lol.

Blulu

If folk want to, we could test it to see.

We would need people who win on Twitter to post their wins here, or on a separate thread, if that would be better. Everyone who posts about a Twitter win needs to also mention if they are 'end-dater' compers, or not.

We would just need to keep a running score. If it turns out that end-daters win significantly more than the rest of us, I think that would validate the idea that earlier tweets are sometimes being lost.

What do people think?

Blu XXX

Iggy1313

EVen us end daters enter up to two weeks or more in advance, we still wouldn’t be in the last 25-50 tweets.

Personally I have won twice on Twitter this year, once two weeks after I retweeted and the second literally 4 minutes after I retweeted...

My guess would be some comps they just use what they can see and others use a proper app

Monkey_Chinchilla

I very rarely enter Twitter competitions as don’t want to spam my followers but yes the couple I have won I entered with 10 mins or less to go before the competitions closed. Companies should use a random generator but I suspect most don’t bother.

pate-ci0

I have entered hundreds if not thousands of Twitter competitions and not won a single one yet. I enter as soon as I can when they appear on MSE, rarely on the last day. Could this be the reason? Who knows, but I may start to leave them till later....

mjm3346

To be statistically significant you would need not only a far larger and more varied sample than you could get on here you would also need details of every losing entry as well as the winning ones

Say there were 50 people who won entering in the last 30 mins and only 20 people who won entering with 2 days to go, it looks like entering with 30 mins to go would be best -

But if you also knew 2,000 people entered in the last 30 mins but only 200 with 2 days to go, then you would know your odds of winning would be far better entering with 2 days to go.

The potential bias has been posted about on the forum before and the "leaning" would be towards entering later - I remember a "Lucky" blogger had a piece on this quite a while ago.

https://superlucky.me/choosing-winner-rt-giveaway/


As it takes more effort to select from a full list of entrants it has to be likely that not 100% of promoters will do so and as it is the later entries that show without any extra effort needed this could lead to an advantage in these cases (obviously, if they are allowed, multiple retweets make a difference just the same as extra entries do for ordinary multiple entry competitions)

Pinkzie

Thanks everyone for all of your opinions on this.


I googled and clicked on the first suggestion for a Twitter draw a winner type site, which was free. It did use all the retweet data in my tweet, so I am quite confident we are all included when companies draw using this kind of method.

How many do this though? It's impossible to say. I would say entering close to the end is the best option, because you will be included when companies use this very fair method that includes all, but then also likely to be included if they manually pick from the most recent retweet list that is visible to them at the end of the competition.

I am going to experiment some more with very close to the end retweeting/quote retweets/comments and will update this thread if I find out anything interesting

thetav5

Just to throw in my experience here... last year I was entering a lot of twitter competitions and doing quote tweets but ALWAYS entered them on the day they were closing and I won (on average) once a week, sometimes up to 3-5 times a week. So I would tend to agree that late entry works better for twitter comps!

This was at a time when I ONLY entered twitter comps (on my phone) however, these prizes were generally low level prizes so I've bought a new laptop and I'm returning to try my luck with the website based comps again! Hopefully my lucky comp fairy returns