How to choose a winner for your social media competition

Running a social media competition is a great way to increase engagement and followers online while raising brand awareness. Often, it can also help with sales and the growth of your business. A social media competition can also help to grow your email list in a short space of time, allowing you to reach a new and bigger audience.

Facebook and Instagram are often the platforms of choice for a social media-style giveaway. But before you announce the contest you will need to familiarise yourself with the various stages, protocol,s and tools that will help you along the way, including documentation proving that you picked your winner fairly.

This article will focus on the winner selection process: how do you make it truly random? You don't want to be accused of fraud or favouritism.

Here are three tools we find the most useful when picking a social media competition winner fairly:

1. Random name picker

There are many random name picker tools out there. One that has worked successfully for us in the past is MiniWebTool's random name picker- you just enter one name per line in the text field and then click on the "Pick a Random Name." button. It will then automatically choose a random name for you.

Time saver: if you're are keeping records of your entries in a spreadsheet, you can copy and paste your list into the form.

2. Google 'Random Number Generator'

By googling 'random number generator' there are many free tools available (including Google's own), providing a straightforward and fair way to pick your competition winners. To begin with, each of your entries needs to be assigned a number - then enter the minimum and maximum numbers to use on the tool, and select 'generate'. Easy peasy!

3. Woobox's Pick a Winner Tool

If you are running a contest on your Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram timeline,  Woobox's Pick a Winner Tool will randomly choose a winner for you free of charge. You will need to sign up for an account and connect to your social media channel.

Then: > select the post you want to use to select your winners >choose whether comments or comments and likes count as entries >select the "Pick Winner" button.

Whichever method you use, remember to take a screenshot of the result to document how you randomly picked the contest winner.

Good luck! Are you running a social competition at the moment? Do you have any questions about it? Let us know below.