Twitter Giveaway Picker: How to Run a Giveaway and Pick a Winner

A giveaway on Twitter (now X) is a quick, low-cost way to engage your audience, get your brand seen and drive the actions you care about.

Setting one up can be as simple as posting about your campaign and telling people how to enter. You can ask them to follow you, like, retweet or reply to your post, or post with a set hashtag.

How you pick winners depends on how people enter. Here are the best methods for each type of giveaway.

Some of the quickest Twitter giveaways to run let people enter by:

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

These giveaways are simple to set up, but picking a winner is harder. Free tools that pick from followers, likes or replies are hard to find, which leaves you with two main options:

One approach is to record every entry yourself and use a random list picker to choose a winner. MiniWebTool and Comment Picker both have good free tools for this.

This lets you record entries from several entry options, but recording every entry by hand takes far longer than the other approaches below.

If you have an exported list of every @username instead, paste it into our Random Username Picker and draw a winner from the list. Here is the picker in action:

Another way to draw winners from follows, likes, replies or retweets is to give every entry a number, generate a random number in that range, and match it to an entry to find your winner.

For example, if people enter by liking one of your posts, generate a number between 1 and your total number of likes. Then count down the list of likes until you reach that number, and that is your winner.

If you want people to complete more than one action (for example, liking your post and following you), draw a random entry from the likes, check by hand whether they follow you, and decide whether the win is valid.

Random.org and Google's Random Number Generator both work well for this.

A random number generator is much quicker than recording entries yourself, but it still limits you to a few simple actions.

Follows are one of the most valuable actions a giveaway can drive, and the best way to get them is an opt-in giveaway, which we cover below.

If you want people to enter instantly by interacting with your post, retweets are a solid option.

Retweets spread your giveaway to new people, and they are easy to draw from with tools like Tweetdraw. Enter the URL of your post and click go.

The main drawback is that a simple retweet picker limits your giveaway to retweets alone.

If you want retweets and other actions too, consider running your giveaway with a third-party giveaway app.

A hashtag contest asks people to enter by posting with a set hashtag.

You can use it to have people answer a question, respond to a prompt or post about your brand. Every entry puts your hashtag in front of the entrant's followers.

You can also ask people to post photos or videos related to your brand, which gives you user-generated content you can share later.

You can pick winners from a hashtag contest in one of two ways:

Search your hashtag, record the valid entries and use a random list picker to find your winner. This gets impractical fast as entries grow, so we recommend the second approach.

With Gleam's Competitions app, you can create a giveaway that collects posts with your hashtag in real time and draws a random winner when the time comes.

If you want to run a photo contest, you can also collect hashtagged submissions from Instagram in the same campaign.

A reply contest asks people to reply to one of your posts for a chance to win.

You can use it to ask a question, collect testimonials, gather ideas and more.

There are two main ways to draw winners from replies:

Look through your replies, record the valid entries and use a random list picker to find your winner. Like the hashtag version, this gets impractical fast, so we recommend the second approach.

With Gleam's Competitions app, you can create a giveaway that collects replies to your post in real time and draws a random winner when you are ready.

Gleam's import actions track, collect and validate replies for you. You can also filter submissions by a set hashtag or word, so only entrants who follow your guidelines count.

You can run a hashtag or reply contest on its own, or make it one action in a wider campaign.

If you want more from a giveaway than one action, run it with a dedicated third-party app like Gleam's Competitions app.

Your giveaway sits in a widget where people can follow you, retweet and post on Twitter, and also subscribe to your newsletter, refer friends, and visit 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 run your giveaway on your own website or on one of our hosted landing pages, and send traffic to it from your posts and every other channel.

This is the most flexible way to run a Twitter giveaway. You can drive actions on Twitter and beyond, collect and validate entries in a transparent way, and draw random winners the moment your giveaway ends.

The one downside is that people leave Twitter to enter through your widget instead of entering right on the platform.

That extra step is worth it. You can ask for more actions than a single like or retweet, and promote the same giveaway on every channel you have, so followers from one platform find you on the others.

Run Your Own Twitter Giveaway With Gleam

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