Book giveaway failed due to lack of response

The book giveaway I set up via Twitter failed miserably. Only two people responded and even those were suspected bots or at least twitter accounts that have a commercial interest in giveaways and competitions. I could let a random number generator decide between those two entries but where’s the fun in that? So I declare the give away a failure. Which is fair enough as it was an experiment in the first place and experiments have the inherent potential of failure. So it’s back to the drawing board. Or maybe not even that because I am not that much interested in online marketing to spend a lot of energy I could use for writing in setting up competitions.

It was fun to try this and although the result was less than encouraging it did make me think about twitter as a marketing tool. There are do’s and don’t-s and I am beginning to think that this giveaway was a don’t. The prize may have lacked temptation, maybe it was too complicated for the humble prize I offered, it may be it was regarded as unethical twitter follower baiting or my @tdaonpromo stream may not be informative enough yet. In any case, some work to be done on that and no doubt it will result in a blog post somewhere down the line.