Though Twitter can be a great place to host a contest, there are rules and regulations that come with launching a campaign on the popular micro-blogging platform. Host a successful and robust contest, sweepstakes giveaway or promotion by following Twitter’s contest guidelines.

Many business, organizations and individuals offer contest through their profile on Twitter. Usually contests require users to tweet (or retweet) a specific update, have users follow a specific account, or post a 140-character update with a particular hashtag.

When creating a Twitter contest, discourage users from creating multiple profiles to enter your promotion. People who abuse Twitter accounts will be suspended from the service, so it’s best to include in your terms of use that users are ineligible if they enter under multiple accounts.

Posting duplicate or very similar updates should be frowned upon. It is a violation of Twitter Rules and can even remove your contest from Twitter searches. Do not encourage users to post a lot of duplicate updates as followers might also become annoyed with your contest. The best practice is to not allow multiple entries to be submitted in one day.

When collecting entries, it may be helpful to ask users to reply to your account when participating in your contest. When people use the “@reply” function of Twitter, you will be able to see all updates (and contest submissions) in your Mentions timeline. The @username feature is also an easy way to verify if a user’s profile is legitimate and to select a winner.

If you decide that your contest requires users to update on a specific topic, encourage the use of relevant hashtags such as “#contest” or “#companypromotion.” Hashtags are only effective when they are relevant to the users’ updates. If users add a contest hashtag to a completely unrelated subject, that Twitter account might be violating Twitter regulations.