How To Randomly Generate Winners For Your Giveaway

When you run luck-based promotional giveaways it's important that you have a reliable and effective system for picking winners ready to go. This can seem like a bit of a challenge at first, especially as you start to rack up more and more entries, but there are a ton of easy ways you can pick random winners for your giveaway.

The method you choose will depend on what type of giveaway you're running and how you're collecting entries. Some of the easiest ways to get users to enter a giveaway are by posting your giveaway on social media and allowing users to enter by interacting with you or your post in various ways. This can include likes, shares, follows, replies, comments, shares, retweets and much more.

To help you start effectively picking winners we're going to take you through all the best ways you can randomly choose winners for any type of giveaway.

A quick way to pick random winners for social media giveaways is to use random number generators. All you need to do is allocate every entry a number, use a random number generator to select a number, and match that number up with an entry to determine a winner.

For example, if you're running a giveaway where users have to like one of your tweets to enter then you can randomly generate a number between 1 and the total amount of likes. You then count down the list of likes until you reach the randomly generated number.

If you randomly generate the number 10, then you select the 10th like down as the winner.

This an effective approach for giveaways that users can enter with simple, singular social media actions. This includes:

• Facebook Page & Post Likes
• Facebook Comments
• Instagram Follows, Likes & Comments
• Twitter Follows, Likes, Replies & Retweets
• YouTube Comments & Subscriptions

You can determine winning entries with random number generators like the one found on Random.org, or you can simply use Google's Random Number Generator.

Counting down through all your entries to find the winning number can be a hassle, but unless you have an effective way of automatically recording entries in real time then picking random winners once your giveaway has ended is generally quite time consuming.

Another effective approach you can take to randomly generating winners is using an online random list picker, such as those provided by MiniWebtool, Comment Picker, or Gleam's Random Name Picker which allows you to generate random winners by entering all of your entrants names manually or uploading them in a CSV.

You can then draw winners in a fun way that's perfect for private or publicly streamed winner draws.

All you need to do is choose your Instagram post and Gleam's powerful Quick Draw tool will handle the rest.

One of the most effective types of campaigns you can run on Instagram are photo contests. To run successful photo contests you can instruct users to share their submissions on Instagram and either @mention you in their post, use a designated #hashtag or both.

If you want to pick a random winner for your photo contest then there are two main approaches you can take:

One option is to search through submissions, collect and record every valid entry and use a random list picker to choose your winner.

If you run your photo contest with Gleam's Competitions app you can use our powerful, easy to set up templates to collect submissions from Instagram, pick winners, and even showcase entries in stylish galleries.

When you run opt-in giveaways with 3rd party app like Gleam you will be able to cross-pollinate your social followings and drive an array of awesome actions on Instagram, every other social media platform and so much more.

To more powerful campaigns that award entries to users who subscribe to your mailing list, retweet or follow you on Twitter, visit your webpage and other social media profiles, share your giveaway with friends and a whole lot more.

Ready To Run Your Own Giveaway?

Check out our documentation on setting up your own Competition with Gleam or check out the app now!