Running a contest or giveaway on Facebook is a highly effective and cost-efficient strategy that allows you to quickly boost engagement and build exposure.

One of the best ways you can get users to enter your Facebook contest is by asking them to comment on one of your posts for a chance to win.

This type of giveaway is incredibly easy to set up, and it can be a highly effective way to engage your audience and promote your brand.

Plus, when entrants comment on your post they will expose your contest to their own social circles which will not only help you maximise participation, but also give you the perfect opportunity to connect with potential new customers and fans.

When you run a Comment to Win contest on Facebook you'll need to come up with an effective and reliable way to randomly draw winners.

Tools like Comment Picker allow you to randomly pick winners from the comments of one of your Facebook posts. All you have to do is log into your Facebook account, select your contest post and click Start. You can even choose whether or not you want to allow users to enter multiple times with multiple comments.

This tool is very quick and easy to use, but it does have some major limitations. For starters, you can't validate entries which is pretty important if you want users' comments to follow certain guidelines. It's also difficult to maintain a record of your entry collection and winner drawing process, and you will be unable to drive any additional entry actions.

Or if you have an exported list of all the @usernames or comments you can use our Random Comment List Picker to put them all into a list and just generate the winner.

One of the best things about running a contest or giveaway is the opportunity to drive an array of powerful actions and when you use this type of tool to draw your winners you will be limited to only driving comments from your entrants.

The ideal approach to collecting and drawing random winners from Facebook comments is using a 3rd party platform like Gleam's Competitions app.

With Gleam's powerful import actions you can set up a giveaway that will automatically award entries to anyone who comments on your Facebook post and instantly draw a random winner when you're ready.

You'll even be able to drive awesome additional actions, but we'll talk more about that soon.

All you need to do is create a campaign, select the Facebook Post & Photo Comments Import Action, connect your Facebook account and add a link to the post you want to import comments from.

You can allow users to complete a single entry, unlimited entries, or even daily or weekly entries.

You're also able to filter entries to accept comments with media, text comments, or all comments, as well as restrict entries to comments which include designated hashtags or words which gives you greater control over the types of entries you collect.

Once your contest has wrapped up all you have to do to is pick a winner. Open up your Gleam campaign and click Draw Winners in the Winners tab.

If the comment you pick doesn't meet your entry criteria you can simply click Re-pick win under the Status column. It's that easy.

You'll then have the winners' Facebook details ready to go so you can easily reach out to them and let them know they've won.

The easiest way to announce and promote your contest is simply posting about your campaign and instructing users to comment on the post for a chance to win.

The post should clearly outline your giveaway. This includes highlighting your prize, providing a closing date for your giveaway, letting users know that all they have to do to enter is comment, and providing any specifications for their comments.

It's also a savvy move to ask entrants to like you on Facebook, but you should make it clear that this isn't mandatory as incentivising page likes violates Facebook's Promotion Guidelines.

Running a comment contest on Facebook is a great way to quickly boost engagement, expose yourself to potential new fans and grow your presence on Facebook, but comments are far from the only powerful action you can drive with your Facebook contest.

The best part about running a Facebook contest with Gleam is the ability to drive a wide array of actions that will aid your growth on Facebook and beyond.

You can award entries to users who visit your Facebook or Instagram profile, follow or retweet you on Twitter, sign up to your newsletter, check out your website, share your giveaway with friends and so much more.

Take a look at this demo to get an idea of just some of the actions you can drive with Gleam:

You can easily run contests that automatically award entries to users who comment on your contest post and give them the opportunity to earn more entries by following a link to your campaign from your post and completing more actions.

If you want to drive more actions with Gleam you can easily host your contest on your own website, or on one of our hosted landing pages.

You can even opt to skip the comment aspect entirely and run your contest exclusively from the widget. This gives you a fantastic opportunity to drive traffic to your contest from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and any other platforms you operate on to maximise participation and cross-pollinate your online followings.

Ready To Run Your Own Facebook Contest?

Read more about how you can run perfect Facebook contests with Gleam or check out the Gleam app and get started right away!