(I know this is a pretty late response, but I'm new and just saw your post.)
I think that since there was really no direct win for people in the contest, it's hard to motivate folks to participate. All the contests that have grabbed my attention were the sort where somebody actually won a prize for taking part - say, a gift card to somewhere - based on results. A lot of blog contests do this. Comment and you're entered, like a raffle. Tweet the contest and you get another entry. It's a good way to really raise awareness on Twitter especially. And then when the contest is over, use a random number generator to pick the winner out of the comments.
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Running contests to increase your online community.
WDGmatt says,
Hello everyone!
This is Matt from We Dream Games, a startup box game development devoted to the istore market. As a new house on the block with weird ideas, we are at the point where we need people paying attention to us for any of our projects to have a shot.
Well, we are currently trying a contest to increase the reach of our communications ( a facebook / twitter contest for the rebating of our app – read more here http://wedreamgames.com/contests/) but I would like to hear some stories of similar programs you lead and the results you encountered.
I can tell you I started ours 3 days ago and saw a 30% increase on the total number of followers on facebook and only a trickle on twitter. I commit to sharing my results when something newsworthy comes up!
Thank you everyone!
Talk to you soon!
Matthieu R