How to Create a Social Media Contest (Step by Step)

Never run a giveaway before? Good, because this guide assumes exactly that. We will go from a blank screen to a live social media contest one step at a time, with a screenshot of every screen you will touch inside Gleam.

And if you are wondering whether this really works for a brand your size: SignalRGB used Gleam giveaways to drive nearly 10,000 software installs and 3,164 Discord joins from a single campaign. New Blood Interactive has run 35 campaigns and 2.6 million entry actions over nine years. Mwave has built an email list of more than 200,000 buyers across 202 campaigns. Every one of them started exactly where you are now, with one campaign. You can do this too.

The terms get used interchangeably, but they mean different things, and getting this right keeps you on the right side of the law.

• Giveaway: a broad, casual term for any promotion where a prize is given away. Often used to describe all three types below.
• Sweepstakes: entry is free and open to everyone, winners are chosen by random draw, and no purchase is necessary. This is the most common format online and the one this guide focuses on.
• Contest: entry requires skill or effort (a photo, a caption, a vote) and winners are judged on merit, not drawn at random.
• Lottery: requires a purchase to enter. Running an unlicensed lottery is illegal in most countries, so avoid this format unless you have legal clearance.

If you are asking people to follow, share, or sign up, you are running a sweepstakes, not a contest in the strict sense. For the full legal picture, read our No Purchase Necessary Laws guide.

Everything that follows flows from your goal. A contest with no clear goal just hands you a list of people who wanted a free thing, not a list of people who want what you sell.

Pick one primary goal to start:

• Grow your email list: make a newsletter sign-up a required action and choose a prize only your ideal customer would want
• Increase social followers: make a follow action required, then add share actions for reach
• Drive product awareness: use a prize tied to your product range and collect purchase intent with a question
• Generate UGC: run a photo or video submission with a clear brief

Now the most important decision you will make: the prize. A generic prize (cash, a gift card, a new iPhone) fills your list with people who want cash. A specific prize attracts buyers. Pick a prize your customers will fight for.

You do not need a huge budget to do this well, you need relevance. SignalRGB built a fully working gaming PC inside a real panini press, a prize so on-brand and shareable that gamers could not stop talking about it. New Blood Interactive gave away a custom ULTRAKILL gaming PC built with a hardware partner, which meant only real fans of their games entered. Mwave ties prizes to GPU launches and game releases their audience already cares about. The lesson is the same at every size: the closer the prize is to what you sell, the higher the quality of every lead you collect.

Open Gleam Competitions and start a new campaign. The Setup tab is where you name your giveaway and set the ground rules. Start with the name, then the dates.

A few things to know on this screen:

• Competition name: this appears in entrant emails and forms your landing page URL, so make it recognisable, like Spring Gaming PC Giveaway.
• Start and end dates: set them with the date picker, and use the green time icon for hour and minute control. You can change these at any time, so you can extend or shorten the campaign if you need to.
• Timezone: set this to your audience timezone. It is independent of your account default and controls exactly when the campaign opens and closes.
• Allowed locations: by default your giveaway is open worldwide. Restrict it to specific countries here if your prize can only ship to certain places.

The part beginners worry about most, the legal wording, is handled for you. Gleam automatically generates ready-to-publish, globally compliant Terms & Conditions using the details from your setup, and you can edit any field with a click.

At a minimum, good rules cover eligibility (age, country, whether staff can enter), no purchase necessary, entry method, exact start and end dates with timezone, prize details, how the winner is picked and notified, your business details, and the disclaimer that the promotion is not affiliated with the social platforms you use. Gleam pre-fills all of this, you just review and tweak.

This is how you actually reach the winner and keep marketing to everyone else afterwards. After someone completes their first action, Gleam pops up a short form asking who they are.

Keep it simple to start:

• Email is the point. It is how you contact the winner and how you market to the other 99% of entrants later. If people log in with a social network, Gleam pre-fills as much as that network allows.
• Login options let you accept email only, a single social network, or several. A single login type is handy if your contest is focused on one platform.
• Build Competition Subscriber List adds an optional checkbox so entrants can opt in to hear about your future giveaways, which lets you amplify every campaign you run after this one.

This is the heart of your giveaway. Entry actions are the tasks people complete to enter and earn bonus entries. They do two jobs at once: they move your metrics (followers, subscribers, installs, visits) and they tell you something about each entrant. Just pick actions from the list and drag them into the order you want.

Match your actions to the goal you set in Step 1:

The actions you choose directly produce your results, and the numbers are real. In SignalRGB's campaign, asking entrants to subscribe on YouTube brought in 10,451 subscribers, download and install the app drove 9,794 installs, and follow on Instagram added 8,802 followers, all from one giveaway. Mwave goes a step further and uses a simple Visit a Page action to send entrants to live product pages mid-entry. In one campaign, a single check out these ASUS RTX graphics cards action drove 1,315 clicks to a product page from people entering a giveaway for exactly that kind of hardware. Choose the action, and you choose the outcome.

The single most valuable action to add is Viral Share. It gives every entrant a unique referral link and rewards them with bonus entries for friends who enter, which lowers your cost per entrant as the campaign spreads. New Blood's ULTRAKILL PC campaign turned 1,426 sharers into 3,439 successful referrals, and in one Mwave campaign a single superfan shared their link 153 times.

You can also control how actions unlock and repeat:

• Mandatory actions must be completed first before the rest of your actions appear, which is great for guaranteeing a follow or an email before anything else.
• Actions required locks certain actions until a set number of others are done, nudging people to complete more.
• Daily actions reset each day so dedicated entrants can come back and enter again.

The Prize tab is where you make your offer look as good as it actually is. This is the first thing entrants see, so it earns the entry.

Fill in:

• Public competition title and description: the name and the pitch entrants see in the widget. Use the description to sell the prize and explain how to enter.
• Feature image: the single biggest visual win. Upload an image at least 1080px wide. If you want it to look perfect when people virally share on Facebook, use 1080 x 567px.
• Prize details: list what you are giving away and how many winners there are. Adding multiple prizes lets you draw separate winners for each, and your plan sets how many winners you can draw.

The Post-Entry tab controls the moment right after someone enters, and it is quietly one of the most powerful parts of the whole campaign.

• Keep the post-entry email on. It confirms the entry and, crucially, reminds people of extra ways to earn more entries they may have missed. This is free reach.
• Post-entry redirect can send people to a thank-you page, a discount, or your store once they finish.
• Pixel tracking is the optional, more advanced piece: fire a Facebook, Google, or other pixel so you can retarget everyone who saw or entered your campaign. You do not need this for your first giveaway, but it is there when you are ready to scale.

A giveaway with no promotion produces no entries. The good news: when you host on Gleam, one link covers every channel. Post it everywhere and the Viral Share action does the rest. Plan your promotion before you hit launch.

On launch day:

• Post to every social channel you own with a clear, eye-catching image
• Email your existing list first, they are your warmest audience
• Pin the post on Instagram, Facebook, or X so it stays visible

During the campaign:

• Post a reminder at roughly the halfway mark
• Share entries and UGC (with permission) to build social proof
• Use a little paid social to seed reach if your organic following is small

Near the close:

• Send a last-chance email and post with the exact deadline
• Urgency near the end reliably produces a second spike of entries

This is the payoff. Mwave times campaigns to moments their audience already cares about, like a GPU launch, and consistently sees conversion rates above 25%. Pick your moment, launch, and promote it with confidence.

When the clock runs out, two things happen.

Pick your winner fairly. Your method should match what your rules said. For a sweepstakes that means a random draw. Gleam draws winners automatically from verified, eligible entries only, filtering out duplicates and unfulfilled actions before the draw. Once drawn, announce the winner publicly to build trust and close the loop for everyone who entered. Picking outside Gleam? Try the Random Name Picker or the Instagram Comment Picker.

Then keep every lead. Picking a winner is the start of your follow-up, not the end. Every entrant gave you permission to contact them, so use it: send the winner announcement to all entrants (with a consolation offer where you can), welcome new subscribers, and segment your follow-up using what people told you during entry. For the full playbook, read How to Lower Your Cost Per Lead With Giveaways.

A social media contest done well is not a one-off spike, it is a repeatable system for building an audience you own at a cost that falls every time you run one. Set one clear goal, pick a prize your ideal customer will fight for, choose entry actions that match your funnel, let Gleam handle the rules, then launch and promote with confidence.

The brands in this guide were not born with huge audiences. They built them campaign by campaign, starting with a single giveaway. So can you.

Once your first campaign is live and you want to go further, Gleam has the advanced tools waiting: custom branded emails, pixel retargeting, webhooks, multi-prize draws, custom CSS, email and phone verification, and more.