How To Pick Winners For Your Twitter Giveaway

Running a giveaway on Twitter is a quick, cost-efficient and highly effective way to engage your audience, boost awareness and drive meaningful action.

Setting up a Twitter giveaway can be as simple as Tweeting about your campaign and telling users how they can enter. You can ask users to enter by following you on Twitter, liking, retweeting or replying to your Tweet, or even tweeting with a designated hashtag.

Depending on how you ask users to enter there are several ways you can pick winners for your giveaway, and we're going to take you through all the best methods you can use.

Some quick and easy types of Twitter giveaway you can run are those which allow users to enter by:

• Following you on Twitter
• Liking your tweet
• Retweeting you

As simple as these giveaways are to set up, picking winners can be quite a challenge. There are no free online tools available to randomly pick followers, likes or replies which leaves you with two main options:

One approach you can take is to manually compile and record all of your entries and use a random list picker to choose a winner. MiniWebTool and Comment Picker both have good free tools you can use.

If you take this approach you can record entries from multiple entry options, but the obvious downside is that manually recording every entry is absurdly time consuming and not worth the effort when compared to other approaches you can take.

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

Another approach you can take to drawing winners from follows, likes, replies or retweets is allocating every entry a number, using a random number generator to draw a number within the appropriate range, and matching that number to 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 you can randomly generate a number between 1 and the total number of likes. You then count down the list of likes until you reach the randomly generated number and that's your winner.

If you want users to complete multiple actions (e.g. liking your tweet and following you) you can draw a random user from the likes, manually check if they're a follower, and determine if their win is valid based on that.

Random.org and Google's Random Number Generator are both good tools if you want to take this approach.

Using a random number generator is a lot quicker than manually recording entries yourself, but you will still be limited to driving a limited number of actions and won't be able to take full advantage of the truly awesome opportunity giveaways present.

Getting users to follow you on Twitter is one of the more effective actions you can drive, and the best way to do it is by running an opt-in giveaway, which we'll talk about soon.

If you want to run a giveaway where users can instantly enter by interacting with your tweet then retweets are a solid option.

Not only are they a good action to drive for building exposure and driving engagement, they're also super easy to randomly generate winners from with tools like Tweetdraw. All you need to do is enter the URL of your tweet and click go.

The primary drawback of taking this approach is that using a simple retweet picker essentially limits your giveaway to only driving retweets.

If you want to drive retweets and an array of other meaningful actions you should consider using a 3rd party giveaway app to run your giveaway and draw winners.

One particularly powerful type of Twitter giveaway you can run is a hashtag contest. This type of contest involves getting users to enter by tweeting with a designated hashtag.

You can use this type of contest to get users to answer questions, respond to prompts or tweet about your brand or giveaway. This can be a great way to help you raise awareness and expose your brand to a relevant new audience.

You can even use hashtag contests to get users to tweet photos or videos that are relevant to your brand. This is a fantastic way to boost engagement and promote the creation of valuable user-generated content.

When you run a hashtag contest you will be able to pick winners in one of two ways:

One option is to search through your hashtag, manually record the valid entries and use a random list picker to find your winner. This option is once again highly inconvenient and impractical (especially as you start driving more entries), so we recommend you take the second approach.

With Gleam's Competitions app you can easily create giveaways that will collect submissions from your designated hashtag in real-time and randomly draw winners when the time comes.

Gleam's import actions make tracking, collecting and validating hashtagged tweets (as well as instantly picking random winners) a walk in the park.

If you want to run a photo contest you can even collect hashtagged submissions from Instagram as a part of your campaign.

Another type of Twitter contest you can run to drive audience engagement and interact with your audience is a reply contest were users can reply to a tweet of yours for a chance to win.

This type of contest can be used to ask question, collect testimonials, generate interesting content and more.

When you run this type of contest there are two maiun approaches you can take to drawing winners:

One option is to look through your replies, manually record the valid entries and use a random list picker to find your winner. This is once again a highly inconvenient and impractical option (especially as you start driving more entries), so we recommend you take the second approach.

With Gleam's Competitions app you can easily create giveaways that collect submissions from the replies to your designated tweet in real-time and randomly draw winners when you're ready.

Gleam's import actions make tracking, collecting and validating replies incredibly easy. You can even automatically filter submissions by a designated hashtag or word to help ensure that entrants are following your guidelines.

With Gleam, you can run a hashtag or reply contest on its own, or you can drive hashtagged tweets as a part of a wider campaign that will drive all the actions that matter most to you.

Giveaways have enormous potential to boost engagement and drive growth. If you want to take full advantage of everything they have to offer then you should consider running your giveaway with a dedicated 3rd party app like Gleam's Competitions app.

These giveaways are cased in stylish widgets and you can use them to drive follows, retweets and tweets on Twitter, as well as loads of other actions including newsletter subscriptions, social referrals, visits to your website, Facebook page, Instagram profile, YouTube channel, and much more.

Take a look at this demo we put together to see what your own giveaway could look like with Gleam:

You can even run your giveaway on your own website or on one of our hosted landing pages and drive traffic to the campaign through tweets and all of your other promotional channels.

This is the optimal way to run a Twitter giveaway because it will give you the ability to drive an array of powerful actions both on Twitter and beyond. Plus, you'll be able to collect and validate entries in a reliable and transparent way and instantly draw random winners once your giveaway has concluded.

The only potential downside of running this type of giveaway is that instead of entering directly on Twitter, users will have to navigate away and enter the giveaway via the widget.

While this can add a slight obstacle to immediate entry, the pros far outweigh the cons as you would be able to drive more valuable actions, and also drive traffic to your giveaway through more channels which is an outstanding way to maximise participation and cross-pollinate your social followings.

Run Your Own Twitter Giveaway With Gleam

Take a look at Gleam's Competitions app and see how you can use it to perfectly execute your next giveaway.