This is more a lesson on how not to run a Twitter contest. Messages are ephemeral, and people don't check your timeline for other messages around the time that

This is more a lesson on how not to run a Twitter contest. Messages are ephemeral, and people don't check your timeline for other messages around the time that may or may not relate to the contest (such as, er, announcing a winner). When we ran a twitter contest we had a canonical blog post about it too, which was linked in every tweet and updated when the contest was over. Mind you, it wasn't a retweet-this-tweet type contest so we didn't track if people were tweeting mindlessly once it was over -- but nobody complained.