If you run Facebook competitions on your business page it can be hard to select a winner. Since the rule changes last year Facebook has allowed us to choose a winner from people who leave a comment on a post or Like a post. The problem arises when a competition is successful. If we get hundreds of comments how can we ensure that we are fair when we select a Facebook contest winner?
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In the video below I show you three free apps you can use to select a winner from your Facebook contest entries.
1. Fanpage Karma’s Good Luck Fairy
This is the easiest app to use. You just need to paste a link to your post into the app and it will select a winner for you. It selects four winners from people who have Liked or commented on your post:
- From people who like your post
- From people who comment on your post
- From people who like and comment on your post
- The comment on your post that got the most Likes
2. Woobox
This is an app that allows you to create custom apps and competitions for Facebook and it comes with a free Facebook competition winner picker. You will need to set up an account but it’s free and only takes a couple of minutes. The app will import all your recent posts and allow you to pick a winner from those who have interacted with them.
3. Contest Capture
This works slightly differently to the other apps. Instead of picking a winner for you it allows you to download a CSV file (that you can open in excel) containing information about the people who have interacted with your post.
This includes:
- The type of interaction: Like or Comment
- The user ID of the Facebook user who interacted
- The link to the profile of the user who interacted
- The name of the Facebook user who interacted
- The date and time that the comment was left
You will need to pick a winner manually from this data.
See how these tools work in the video below:
*Bonus* Comment Picker
Thanks to the comments on this post I’ve found another cool tool. Comment picker lets you choose a winner from people who comment on your posts. Watch below to see how it works.
Picking Facebook Competition Winners Manually
If you don’t want to use an app you can choose a winner manually. The traditional way is to put names in a hat and picking a winner. For photo / video or contests you might get them judged by a third party.
To add validity to your selection process you can film the draw being made.
Your Turn
How do you pick winners for your Facebook competitions?
Have you tried any of these apps?
Leave me a comment below
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Excellent, thanks Amanada. Firstly I hadn’t realised until your last post that we can now have competitions that like and comment and then of course, how to pick the winners. Another post to bookmark with excellent tips 🙂
Thanks Dee 🙂 Let me know if you give Facebook contests another go 🙂
I can remember writing all the names onto pieces of paper and pulling a name from a hat – which adds its own element of fun. I like the idea of the Good Fairy one and much handier than picking random numbers.
I love the names in a hat thing. It’s also great if you film the process so people know you are doing it for real 🙂
What about picking a winner from a FB event? I hold classes on FB, and want to pick a winner from the class participants. When I try to copy and paste the link into Fanpage Karma, it says that event posts cannot be used.
I can’t use woo box as I don’t have a buisness, when I posted the link to the good luck fairy it told me that the post must be public. Which is impossible as the group is a closed group and has more members than what allows me to still be able to change the group name or setting from closed to public. Is there any way around this?
Is there a possibility to make a fair random draw on those who like a page (not a post)? That would be great.
Hi Stef, No there’s no way of doing this. For some reason Facebook don’t really want us seeing who likes our page.
You can’t do this via a group, it would technically be in breach of Facebooks guidelines as you are running it from a personal account.
This only works for pages. Sorry I missed your comment when originally posted.
Can you pick a winner randomly from everyone who is a member of a group page?
How do I pick a winner from an existing competition? Or does the competition need to be set up through woobox before going live?
Hi Angela, The video shows you how to pick winners and no, you don’t have to have a competition set up via an app.
Unfortunately no, it won’t work with groups. There may be a tool that does it but I don’t know about it yet!
Hi Amanda, I want to use woobox to pick a winner for an existing facebook contest (via a post) but I can’t find how… can you help me?
Thanks for writing this! Even though it was posted originally two years ago I found it very useful 🙂 Just thought I would mention thought that the Goodluck Fairy doesn’t seem to pick winners from reactions but only the likes on a post.
Thanks for alerting me to that John.
The most easy way to pick a winner is http://commentpicker.com/
Woobox is NOT free! Maybe it’s free for those do not have Pages but it’s NOT free.
Thanks for sharing. Will give this a try.
Also for youtube 🙂
What is the easiest way when doing a “share post” contest. Finding that I cannot see all of the shares due to some privacy settings.
Hi WMO, Sharing competitions aren’t officially allowed according to Facebok T&C’s. More on that here: https://spiderworking.com/blog/2015/10/27/like-and-share-facebook-reach/
I look up this page every time I’m picking a competition winner and I always use the Fanpage Karma Good Luck Fairy to pick winners. Thanks very much for this!
Thanks for getting in touch. I’m not here right now.
I will be out of the office until the afternoon of 23rd November 2016. I’ll be checking emails sporadically and will respond on my return.
Kind regards,
Amanda Webb
(check out my podcast whilst I’m gone http://bit.ly/blogcentric)
Is there some self hosted script for this??? Thank you
It doesn’t work now
what isnt working exactly?
The url submit button GO doesn’t work. It can’t handle the url. I am with Chrome.
The url submit button GO doesn’t work. It can’t handle the url. I am with Chrome.
It should be working. When u go to the fb page u can sent the link en i can check it for u.
I tried with Firefox and it work fine. But with Chrome still doesn’t work. Even position 1. LOGIN WITH FACEBOOK is empty, facebook button is missing.
Hey I Found This website it look great but i never tryed it yet try it and tell me if it works http://instagram-followers-free.com/ 🙂
Another low-key way to pick a winner: Say you want to pick one out of 75 comments. Use a random number generator (there are lots online) and roll a random # from 1 to 75. Then just count down the comments until you reach this #. This is best for when you don’t have a ton of names to pick from.
So helpful! Was afraid I’d have to manually count through comments!
So glad you found it helpful Sinead 🙂
You can also try http://www.randomwinners.com
Hi, has the contest capture option changed? I have gone into it a few times and even signed up for the Social Bakers suite but it all seems more data analysis and I cant find the contest capture piece :-s
Ah noo, yes it looks like it’s been bought out. I’ll have to look for an alternative.
Thanks for the information.
We have been using random.org to pick the winners for a contest. Just ask them to comment a number between X and Y. The person who comments the lucky number first becomes the winner. So simple is this.
But whatever you have shared is very innovative and new to me. I will see how it makes my contest even better.