Running a competition or draw can be a great way to attract new followers.

You can offer a prize draw for those who retweet a particular phrase, for tweeps who uses a particular #tag or a simple have a draw from new followers.  It not only helps raise your twitter profile but it also adds a bit of fun and interaction to your tweets.

You can of course run the contest manually but there are some tools that can make it easier:

Twitrand.com allows you to either choose one follower randomly from all of your followers or choose a winner from those who have ReTweeted a particular phrase.

Tweetaways.com has a free service and a very reasonably priced paid service.  The free service allows you to pick a winner from those who Retweet a phrase.  The biggest difference between this and Twitrand is that Tweetaways requires you to verify your twitter account. When you sign up it sends you a unique key that you can use in all your contests. The paid service allows you to run the entire competition through the application, giving you more stats etc.

If you want to draw from a group of followers, for example you may want to choose a winner from every 100 followers, I have found two applications that work well in conjunction with each other.

Random.org allows you to pick a number randomly from a set that you specify.  For example 101-200.  To save the hassle of counting back through your twitter followers you can use MyTweeple.com which lists your followers numerically.

If you like playing with cool social media tools join our Facebook page where we have introduced “Monday Morning Cool Tools”.  Designed to blow away the Monday morning blues each week we will be featuring one of our favorite social media apps.