So you ran a giveaway on your Instagram page and now it's time to pick a winner.
So if you're thinking, "uh, how do I do that?"
Then this video is for you because I'm going to walk you through exactly how to easily
and simply pick a winner for your Instagram giveaway.
Now for some giveaways, picking a giveaway winner is very easy, especially if you don't
have that many entries.
But what happens if you have hundreds, if not thousands of entries?
You're not going to count every single one of those by hand.
You need a system or some sort of software that will do it for you.
So in today's video, I am going to break down a variety of ways that you can pick winners
for your Instagram giveaways.
I'm going to have very easy options for very simple giveaways, but if you have giveaways
where people had to share to their story and there were a whole variety of other ways that
they could enter, then I'm going to provide some other options that will make it possible
for you to do that.
Now, one of the reasons I wanted to make this video for you is because I did a video all
about how to run an Instagram giveaway.
I talk about all the steps, all the things you need to do to make sure that you're doing
a great giveaway that is legal and is following all the rules to make sure that you do everything
correctly.
Now in that video I mentioned that you need to pick a winner and I didn't go into specifics
at the time of what my favorite tool or software is because I really didn't have a favorite
one.
And the ones that were there really weren't that great.
So I wanted to wait until I had more time to really research the different options less.
So many of you have watched that video and commented and sent me messages saying, "Hey,
great video, but how do I pick a winner?"
So I thought now would be a perfect time to do that.
Now, like I mentioned in that other video, if you are doing a giveaway compared to a
contest, you need to pick a winner based on chance.
There needs to be a random winner selected.
So you're not just going to pick your friends, you're not going to pick the first comment
that's there.
You really do need to fairly pick a winner and you need to be very transparent with that.
So these methods that I'm about to talk about really do cover all of those bases so that
way you are picking a winner totally by chance.
There's no nepotism, you're not picking your friends because let's be honest, we've all
seen giveaways where they do that and while they won't actually admit to it, you and I
know we both know what's happening.
And that is so unfair and you do not want this to happen for your page or your brand
that because of the giveaway that you did, people have a negative perception about you
because how the giveaway turned out.
So without further ado, let's jump into my favorite ways to pick a winner for your Instagram
giveaway.
So there are a ton of websites and apps out there that will help you pick your winners
for your Instagram giveaways.
the problem is all the good ones with all the functions that you need are paid.
So I spent a ton of time researching and diving into all of the different options so that
way you could have the best free Instagram giveaway winner picker.
Wow.
Say that 10 times fast Instagram giveaway winner picker, Instagram giveaway winner picker,
Instagram giveaway winner picker Instagram giveaway.
But the average person who's running a giveaway probably isn't going to be running a ton of
these.
And so it really isn't worth the cost.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you all the free ways that you can pick
a winner for your Instagram giveaway.
And I'll also mention some of these other paid options in case you want to be doing
a lot more giveaways in your future.
So like I mentioned in that video before, there are a lot of different ways to run a
giveaway and a lot of different ways that people can enter.
The classic is to have people follow, like and leave a comment on your account.
And then usually that comment can be tagging a friend or tagging three friends.
It gets really complicated when you start enabling people to share the giveaway to their
stories.
So we'll talk about that, but let's just talk about your classic giveaway, where you are
going to be picking a winner from the comments.
So let's say they tag X number of friends or they just had to leave a comment.
So let's go ahead and do that right here.
So here's a giveaway that I did on one of my accounts and all they had to do was leave
us a review on iTunes and then they needed to comment back on the post letting us know
that they had done that.
So you can see we had a handful of entries on this.
And so what I'm going to do is I am just going to randomly pick a winner from the comments.
So the simplest way to pick a winner for your Instagram giveaway is to use a random number
generator.
You can find a random number generator by just using Google type in "random number generator.
And Google has one here for you.
It's very simple and easy to use.
All you have to do is put the number of entries that you have, so let's say we had 80 entries,
so you put minimum one max eight zero and then hit generate from there.
It's randomly going to pick a number for you and that number corresponds to the entry.
Now, this works for giveaways that don't have very many entries where you can just count
those by hand, but nonetheless, that still is cumbersome and takes a lot of time.
My number one favorite tool for picking a winner for your Instagram, give away his commentpicker.com
this website actually has a ton of different tools, but I like to go to Instagram tools
and then go to Instagram.
Random comment picker business.
Now the reason it says "business" is because you have to have a creator Instagram account
or a business Instagram account because it uses the Instagram API to link back to your
data.
Now, if you are an influencer or a business, I highly recommend that you upgrade your account
to a creator or a business account or even if just you're using it for your own personal
brand.
The reason is the Instagram business and creators account give you a lot more functionality
and analytics which make using Instagram easier.
So unfortunately you have to have one of those accounts which is linked to a Facebook account
in order to use this.
So if you don't have this, I will show you some other options.
So the very first thing you have to do is you have to click this "login with Facebook"
button.
If you have an Instagram business or creator account, you already have it connected to
a Facebook page.
And so here you just have to approve everything.
All right, so here you go.
It's going to populate all of your posts down here.
But before you do that, you want to check some things.
So the first one is the minimum amount of ad mentions.
Now for giveaways where people had to tag a friend, this is where this minimum amount
of ad mentions comes in.
Now this is really important because a lot of times for a lot of giveaways, people just
tag their friends in different comments.
What this is specifically talking about.
You can see it goes from zero to 10 this is the number of people tagged in one comment.
So if I put this as three, then people had to have commented at least three tags in one
comment for them to even be eligible.
I didn't run my giveaway that way.
And I feel like a lot of people actually don't, even though they may have had to have tag
three friends in the comments, this isn't going to pull all of those because they were
tagged as separate comments.
So for that reason, you want to put it as one.
Now another thing is you may want to even put this as zero because some giveaways in
the rules, you have to leave a comment and then additional entries are tax.
So you don't want the people who left a comment but didn't tag to be out.
So in this giveaway example, they only got an entry if they tagged a friend.
So if they just left a comment, that will not count as an entry.
So I'm going to change this to one.
Now the next thing is include comment replies so people can respond to other people's comments.
If you want those to be eligible, then you can click that.
Now the next one is filter duplicate users.
So in the cases where people are having to tag multiple friends to get multiple entries,
you definitely don't want to click this.
But if you only want one person eligible, no matter how many times they comment, then
you'll definitely want to click this.
And then the last one is filter comments based on a specific text if for some giveaways.
Some people have to leave a comment using the giveaway hashtag.
So if that's the case, you would click that and then you would type whatever the giveaway
hashtag is here and it will only pull comments that have that hashtag.
So my giveaway didn't have that.
So I'm going to leave these three empty.
So now what you do is it's going to pull in all of your different posts.
So I'm going to scroll down to one that I know has a couple hundred entries and...it's
right here.
So you click on that and then it's going to populate the total amount of entries.
In this case it was 206 now you're going to want to go here and it says start raffle and
pick random winner.
So
hit the button and it's going to shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, shuffle, and then finally
it's going to going
to pick a winner.
So right here this is my winner.
And the really cool thing about commentpicker.com is that you can actually save the result and
create a unique URL so that way anyone can go in to verify that the winner was actually
selected by this tool versus picking your friend.
So commentpicker.com is pretty simple and easy, but it only works for a very simple
giveaways.
Now what if you had people where they had to tag at least three friends or if they had
to share to their story to get extra entries?
I'm going to show you how to do that right now.
So unfortunately there is not an easy way to track entries that are done by stories.
You are simply going to have to track those by hand.
So in order to do that, what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to export
all of the comments into a spreadsheet and then you're manually going to have to add
those as they come in.
So that's why a lot of times in those giveaways people will say, "Make sure to tag us in your
story."
And then they're just going to note down the user's name when they do that.
So I'm going to show you that really quickly.
There is a tool that I use to make this really simple.
So you go to getcombot.com now it's going to default in Russian, so you can change the
language up here to English.
And what you're going to want to do is you're just going to want to put in an email address
and then you're going to have to find the link to the Instagram post.
So let's go back to our post to find that you need to find the URL of your Instagram
post.
So you go to instagram.com/whatever your name is.
You find the post and click on it.
And if you're on desktop, you can just go ahead and copy that link right at the top.
If you're on mobile and using the Instagram app, the way you do that is a little different.
So you click on your post, then you click the three dots at the top and then you click
get link and that link is automatically going to be copied.
And then you paste that where you need to go.
So you copy and paste the link right there, like I am not a robot and then send.
Now the problem with this tool is that it does take a long time.
It may take anywhere from a few minutes to a half hour to get your result.
So just be aware of that.
But the reason I like this is because it's free.
A lot of the other comment exporters, they have a limit of maybe a hundred comments or
200 comments and then you have to pay.
So this one I've tested with 50 entries, 200 entries, and I've even done one with 12,000
entries and it works great.
But you just have to wait longer in order to get the results.
Now once you do that, it's going to give you a link where you can track your progress.
So you click that and then it's going to be in Russian.
So I just click right click and do translate to English and then it's going to let you
know how about how long it's going to take.
So for example, this is that post that has 12,000 comments from a company called Coconut
Cleaning.
I know that they have a lot of entries on their giveaways, so that's why I tested this
one and it says the standby time is around 44 minutes.
So just note that the more entries you have, the longer it's going to take for this tool
to work.
But let's go to one of my other ones that I tested.
So once you're done, it's going to give you something like this and you just click this
link right here.
It's going to take you to the post that has all of the entries.
And the reason I like this is because it actually has the number generator right here built
in.
So this had 212 entries and now it's going to randomly generate a number from one through
212 so I can click the button to generate a number and then I can scroll all the way
down 165 so that would be this person right here and you can see here is their name.
And then here was the comment that they left and when was the time for that or there actually
is a button that will just pick the winner directly because if you have thousands of
entries, you don't want to scroll forever.
So there will be a button that says just pick winner.
Then I would go and double check that that person followed all of the requirements.
I would rather pick a winner and then double check that they follow all the rules.
For example, they're following my account.
They liked the post.
Rather than doing that for every single entry and excluding people that way, that's just
way, way too complicated and way too much time.
So then I would go back to my post.
I would look at this person to see if they're following me.
Then I would go back to the original post to see if they did like the post and then
if I had any other requirements I would do that as well.
Now let's say this giveaway, they could also share to their stories.
What you're going to want to do is you're going to use this as your foundation and you're
going to download the results to Excel or Google Sheets.
So here is what that looks like.
Here are all of the entries for this post.
There were 212 entries and then like I said before, you're going to have to be manually
tracking all of the shares to stories.
So if people shared their story and they tag you, you're just going to have to put @username,
you know, @username2 whatever their usernames are and then add that to your list and then
you're going to want to go and use a random number generator to now run this entire list.
So obviously it's a little bit more complicated if you are using the share to stories and
a lot of people actually do this where if they share to stories, you get five entries,
so you're just going to have to write that down on five separate lines because it's five
separate entries.
So again, I really like the site because not only does it give you the ability to run all
of the comments, whether you have a little bit or a lot and you can do it for free, but
it also allows you to pick a winner directly in there and then you can export it to a spreadsheet
where then you can use that to manually track even more entries that come in and then just
use a random number generator from there.
Now of course there are other tools like Woobox and gleam.io and Iconosquare and so many other
tools for picking winners on Instagram.
However, those are paid and so I'll just include links down below.
They have a lot more functionality, but even then I haven't really been able to find any
that will track the story share.
So for that reason, I think the get combat.com is your best solution because it really does
everything you need all in one place.
Now, one other thing that I want to say is when you are picking a winner, I would recommend
recording your screen as you're doing the random number generator and picking the winner
just gives a little bit more transparency into the giveaway that you're running.
So that way people know, Hey, you weren't just picking your friends.
All right guys, I hope you now know all the steps that you need to do to fairly pick a
winner for your Instagram giveaway.
You have a variety of methods to choose from.
So let me know down below which one was your favorite.
If you found this helpful, be sure to give this video a like and subscribe to join the
tribe where I talk about social media and video marketing tips every single week on
my channel.
That's all I have for today and I'll see you next time.