Social media tools are free, but that doesn’t mean that you can get something from nothing. Whether you are spending time or money, social media marketing requires investment, just like growing food or building apps or anything else in life.

That’s why I was so happy to hear that Richard Kirkendall, the CEO of NameCheap and a client of mine, was interested in giving away free domains in a trivia contest on Twitter. I added the element of overall winners to it and a tracking page, wrote the questions, and worked on the automation of the questions with the CTO, and we were on our way. Essentially, @namecheap asked a trivia question in Twitter every hour on the hour. To win a free domain, you have to answer “@namecheap (answer). The fastest to answer as well as two players and random get $9.69 automatically put into a NameCheap account that they have to set up to play. Since Twitter has an API, it’s all integrated. The people who answered the most correctly won iPods.

What were the results?

It cost Richard some domains he might have not sold anyway, the price of a couple of press releases, a few people’s monthly salaries and four iPods. Bloggers are on Twitter. Do things on Twitter that get bloggers talking about you and you get backlinks without spending a fortune on paid links.