Random Comment Picker For YouTube Giveaways

Everyone with a YouTube channel knows the importance of driving constant engagement. Producing quality content on a regular schedule is a must, but it also pays to give viewers an extra reason to comment, like and come back.

Running a contest or giveaway from inside your videos is one of the simplest ways to do that. You can announce your giveaway at the end of your regular content, or devote an entire video to it.

A giveaway gives your audience a reason to keep tuning in, builds a sense of community and can bring in new viewers too.

The easiest way to run a giveaway from a YouTube video is to ask viewers to leave a comment to enter, then draw a random winner from the comments.

Setting up this kind of YouTube contest is quick. Picking the winner is the hard part. There are free and paid YouTube comment pickers online, such as Comment Picker and Sandra Cires YouTube Random Comment Picker, but these tools come with real limitations.

They struggle to block spam entries, offer few comment filters, cannot validate entries or catch duplicate entrants, and leave you with no record of how entries were collected and how the winner was drawn.

There are a couple of ways around these issues:

• Draw from a list. Copy the usernames from your comments into Gleam's Random Name Picker and draw a winner in seconds. It is quick for a small giveaway, but you still have to check each comment against your rules yourself.
• Run it as a Gleam campaign. With Gleam Competitions you can limit entrants to one entry or periodic entries, validate winners against your comment requirements, keep a record of entries and winners, and drive extra actions too.

Here is the Random Name Picker drawing a winner from a list of names:

With Gleam's import actions, you can set up a campaign that collects comments as entries automatically and lets you pick random winners instantly.

Select the YouTube Comments import action, connect your YouTube account, and add the link to the video you want to import comments from.

Once your campaign is live, every viewer who comments on your video gets an entry and a chance to win your prize.

You can also filter entries by hashtags or words. That means you can require entrants to include a set hashtag or word in their comment for the entry to count, which helps make sure everyone follows your submission guidelines.

Your campaign has a single entry interval by default, so each entrant gets one entry no matter how many times they comment on your video. If you want to reward more comments with more entries, change the entry interval to hourly, daily, weekly or unlimited.

The entry interval stops people from spamming the comments to shift the odds in their favor.

When you are ready to wrap things up, head to the Winners tab of your Gleam campaign and click Draw Winners. Gleam picks a winner at random, and you can reach out to let them know about their prize.

If you are giving away multiple prizes, set the number of winners to match how many prizes you are offering.

You can also invalidate any entry you draw that does not meet your giveaway requirements, then draw a new winner. That matters when you ask viewers to comment something specific, such as an answer to a question or feedback on your channel.

If you want your giveaway to work, you need to announce and promote it.

Always announce your giveaway in the YouTube video itself and in its description. Tell people what the prize is, that all they have to do is leave a comment, when entries close, and whether their comment has to meet any requirements.

You should also mention your giveaway in the title of your video. It tells existing subscribers and new viewers alike that there is a reason to click.

Comment contests can also drive outside traffic to your video. When you share your video on other social channels, people are far more likely to click through if they know there is a giveaway involved.

That brings relevant new viewers to your video, and if they like what they see, there is a good chance they will come back for more.

With Gleam, you can also collect entry comments from several videos or YouTube Shorts and draw a winner from the whole pool of entrants.

That lets you give more entries and a better chance of winning to viewers who comment on more of your videos. It is a fantastic way to keep your existing audience tuning in and to get new viewers watching more of your content.

To set this up, create a separate YouTube Comments import action for every video involved. You can add more actions while the campaign runs, so new videos can join the giveaway as you publish them.

You can also use your YouTube giveaway to drive other valuable actions, including newsletter signups and social follows.

Keep commenting as the main way to enter, and use your video, description and social posts to link to a giveaway page where viewers can complete more actions for more chances to win.

Take a look at this demo we put together to see some of the extra actions you could drive:

Extra actions do not stop viewers from entering with a comment alone. They give your most engaged viewers a way to boost their odds, and give you newsletter signups and follows in return.

These campaigns work especially well when you promote them across several social platforms.

If you do not have a website to run the campaign on, you can run it on one of our hosted landing pages and send entrants there.

Ready To Run Your Own YouTube Giveaway?

Take a look at our Competitions app and start running your own YouTube comment contests!