What’s the most exciting part of a giveaway? It’s winning. That’s the moment participants will be looking forward to through the whole campaign. Now, as a organizer, you may be asking yourself but “How to pick a winner?”.
Not only do you have to make it fair but also make sure no one complains.
This article will cover the different options you have as well as give you tools you can to choose a giveaway winner. If you are more of a visual learner, you can also watch this video: https://youtu.be/YUVIzb3ZtiA
Random winner or not?
The first thing you have to do is define whether the winner is going to be random or not. In other words, does the winner have to do something better than the other participants or does he just have to be lucky?
Here I’m going to give you the typical approach for each type of giveaway or contest. It’s important to mention that giveaway is used as the umbrella term so both contest and sweepstakes.
How to pick a winner for Facebook, Instagram, Viral contest?
The meaning of a contest is that people have to compete and do something better than the others. In this case, you have to pick a winner based on his skills.
For example:
– Photo Caption Contest -> The person with the best caption wins. You could also that the comment which gets the most likes wins. In that case, the decision is objective.
– Best Photo Contest -> The person with the best photo wins. In this case, you will have to announce what’s the criteria for choosing that photo. Is there going to be a jury or is there going to some kind of voting?
– Viral Contest -> There is often a leaderboard. People can collect points by spreading the word about your contest and taking certain actions. you can say that the person who collects the most points is going to be the winner.
Obviously, you don’t need to count the points yourself. You can instead use a contest software to do that and it can also automatically pick a winner.
How to pick a winner for a Facebook Giveaway/ Instagram Giveaway / Viral Giveaway
Now if you’re running a sweepstake, the situation is a little bit different. This is a game of luck So the winner has to be chosen randomly.
For example:
– If you are running a sweepstake in Facebook where people have to like and comment in order to win or something similar, than you can use the FB Flash in order to pick the winner. It will choose one random person from everybody who has engaged with your post about the giveaway.
– If you are running a sweepstake in Instagram, you can also use tools to choose a random winner. The first one I recommend is free and you can find it by going to:
https://commentpicker.com/business-instagram.php
https://commentpicker.com/instagram.php
The other one is Instagram Sweepstakes App, which has everything in one place but is not free.
If you are running a sweepstake on YouTube, then use this:
https://commentpicker.com/youtube.php
If you are running a viral sweepstake, some tools give you the option to automatically choose the winner.
Hope this helps! Let me know if you need additional help.