How to Run a Twitch Giveaway and Grow Your Following

Twitch is an awesome platform, especially for gaming streamers.

It can be tricky to get your channel to stand out and gain momentum as the platform is already saturated with over 140 million users.

This is where giveaways come in super handy.

Giveaways are awesome for many reasons.

They are a fantastic way to boost excitement around your channel and create buzz and interest in your live streams.

It's also a fantastic way to reward your loyal subscribers, and encourage new ones to join if they know you regularly run giveaway campaigns.

All in all, they are a fantastic way to grow your community, stand out, build long-term engagement, and keep your audience coming back for more.

A giveaway works by offering up the chance to win an exciting prize to users who complete actions.

There are a couple different types of giveaways you can run depending on your goals and budget.

If you have never run a giveaway campaign before and want something free (other than the cost of the prize), quick, and super simple, then have a go at a simple giveaway directly on Twitch.

These are the standard type of giveaway you see on social media, they usually are along the lines of 'like and tag a friend to enter', and then you use a comment picker to select the winner, or choose yourself.

Here are a couple of ideas:

Announce that you will randomly pick one of your subscribers to win a prize. This is a fun way to reward your existing subscribers.

Announce before the stream that you will be picking a winner on your livestream from the viewers tuned in.

This is an awesome way to attract new viewers, but you can't be sure they are actually going to stay interested in your channel or if they are only tuning in for the giveaway, the leads might not be super high quality and may just result in a brief inflation of engagement.

A Twitch giveaway bot makes it easy to run live, interactive giveaways during your stream.

Set up a bot like Nightbot or Streamlabs, announce the giveaway, and ask viewers to enter by typing a keyword like “!giveaway” in the chat.

The bot tracks entries and randomly picks a winner, automating the process and saving you time.

This method boosts real-time engagement, encourages audience participation, and can help grow your channel by rewarding followers or subscribers while keeping the experience fun and seamless for everyone.

If you want to collect higher-quality leads, including email addresses and customer contact details, drive engagement and growth on platforms beyond Twitch, encourage more specific and impactful actions, and manage a larger-scale giveaway, using a third-party tool like Gleam is the better choice.

Gleam allows you to focus on the fun stuff as we have automatic entry tracking, meaning we can detect fraudulent or invalid entries for you, plus automatically and randomly select the winner for you.

We also have the competitions live draw feature which means you can draw the winner live on stream, this is an epic way to drive even more excitement and engagement.

You can also enable multi-action entry methods, for example visit a link, share your giveaway campaign with a friend, or sign up to your newsletter.

On that note, you can also build your community across all of your other platforms, such as Discord, Instagram, and YouTube, which should translate into higher quality leads as freebie hunters might not go to the effort of following you on other socials or joining your Discord server, for example.

You could also add extra layers of challenge to boost engagement by saying you'll be announcing extra codes on your other socials too, and users need to collect them all to enter.

Another great giveaway idea is to celebrate hitting your subscriber goal by offering an exciting prize as a thank you to your audience.

Once you decide on the giveaway campaign, you need to make sure you have an exciting and enticing prize so that people take the time and effort to enter.

It's best to giveaway something related to your niche, or even better your own product, this way you only attract genuine leads and potential cutsomers.

You then need to make sure you promote your giveaway so that people know about it and how to enter.

Yoou can promote the campaign across all of your socials, via your mailing list, on your stream, and wherever else you contact your audience.

You also need to make sure that your giveaway follows all of Twitch's giveaway rules and guidelines.

This includes:

• Free to Enter: Participation must be free and not require a purchase or paid subscription.
• Clear Terms: Provide easily accessible rules, including eligibility, entry methods, prize details, and winner selection.
• No Misleading Actions: Avoid incentivising spammy or misleading behaviours, like mass tagging or algorithm manipulation.
• Transparency: Clearly state start/end dates and how the winner will be chosen, ensuring a fair process.
• Twitch Disclaimer: Include a disclaimer that Twitch is not a sponsor and is released from all liability.

When setting up your giveaway, it’s important to be clear about how the winner will be chosen. This builds trust and ensures everyone knows the process is fair.

With Gleam, you can select a winner completely at random using its built-in random picker. The platform also filters out invalid or fraudulent entries automatically, so only real participants are included.

For added excitement, you can use Gleam’s Live Draw feature to announce the winner during your stream, making the process fun and engaging for your audience.