How To Get 500 Quality Followers With A Referral Program

Promoting your referral program on Twitter is a great way to attract new followers and get new leads. Find out how we got 500 referrals in seven days.

It's very easy to run a competition on Twitter, have a cool prize, promote it, and then hope for the best. But this may mean that you get lots of entries from people wanting a prize but not people that would find value in your product. 

Having millions of Twitter followers doesn't necessarily mean you'll generate millions in revenue. Generating great content, engaging with your audience, targeting the right audience, and then asking them for referrals is what will help you generate revenue. 

We found the winning formula to make sure you get more of the right followers and generate hot leads, at the same time. Are you ready for the secret?

Build a Refer To Win campaign that uses Twitter as the vehicle for entries.

Here is a step-by-step guide showing how Referral Factory managed to get 500 high-quality followers and turn them into leads. 

Step 1 - Plan your refer to win referral program

Think about how you want your social media referral program to work. Set clear referral objectives, and carefully craft the key message you will use to get customers to A) follow you, B) submit their details to enter, and C) refer their friends. This will help you drive more entries into the competition.

Step 2 - Choose easy to use Referral Software  

The key factors to consider are software that can be fully customized, simple to manage, and can easily integrate with your CRM and other business processes where necessary. We're obviously biased but Referral Factory is perfect for this because it offers referral tracking that allows you to monitor referrals and sign-ups generated from your campaign. Plus, you can run multiple campaigns so you can launch a customer referral program, an affiliate campaign, and of course, your refer-to-win Twitter campaign. 

Step 3 - Decide on the prize

The prize you select should be appealing enough to drive as many entries into your competition as possible, you need to make sure it doesn't cost more than the value you will gain from the competition. Where possible offer a prize that can be used back into your business or one that compliments your industry. Also, keep in mind how your prize/s will be issued.

Step 4  - Design and build your referral program

Follow the steps inside your campaign builder. Make sure that you style your campaign according to your CI and that the tone and message of your referral program align with your business. Referral Factory has some great features that you can include to make your campaign even more powerful. These include - Email Notifications, prepopulated social sharing text, using webhooks to send your entries into your CRM

Step 5 - Setup your referral tracking

Before you launch your campaign, make sure you have decided on the goal of the campaign and how you can track how many referrals completed that action. You can integrate your referral program with your CRM to track referrals generated through your campaign. In our Twitter referral program, users had to follow us on Twitter and complete their registration in order for them to complete their entry. This allowed us to successfully implement referral tracking to qualify a referral only after they had registered. Because we had tracked our referrals, we knew exactly which users came from our Twitter campaign and which of those referrals converted.

Step 6 - Test and launch your campaign

Once you've published your campaign - test the entry mechanics internally. Get your team members to join the campaign and test to see that the flow makes sense. When you're happy with it, it's time to launch your referral competition and tell as many people as possible to enter and refer their friends. You email your existing customers to tell them about the competition, you could include it in your newsletter and of course, you can post it to Twitter.

Step 7 - Engage with people that enter

As users start to join your referral competition and follow you on Twitter, use the opportunity to thank new followers for entering, reinforce the competition message, answer any questions they have, and follow new users back. 

Step 8 - Close your referral competition

Once your competition comes to an end you need to pick a winner. The person with the most referral entries is the person Referral Factory chose as the winner. Another important thing to do here is to thank all your users for participating. We used the same referral tracking setup to pull a report of all users who had been referred to the Twitter campaign and sent them all a personalized email thanking them for entering and announcing the winner. 

Here is an example of how we promoted it on Twitter through our own account @referralfctry

Below are screenshots of the Refer-To-Win Twitter campaign that Referral Factory ran.

Visit our website to read some success stories of customers who successfully implemented referral tracking to measure their campaign performance.