Social media has become a vital site for marketers to capture attention and increase awareness of the brand. More and more companies are using social media platforms to connect with their customers through promotions, contests, and other activities. This makes it essential for companies to use online competition platform to drive more users to their social media accounts for increased engagements.
Social media contest tools are flooding the Internet. Though knowing the best ones can be tricky. Which social media contesting apps are worth trying? It’s not so simple to do. Here you will get the best social media contesting platforms, all of which are free for users.”
SweepWidget
SweepWidget is a powerful online contest app that offers 90+ entry method types on 30+ social media platforms. They make it easy to grow your likes, followers, shares, and user engagement across virtually every major platform. You can run the following types of contests:
- Viral sharing contests/giveaways
- Social media growth contests
- Leaderboard competitions
- Instant coupons/rewards contests
- Milestone campaigns
Build your contests with their easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder. For those of you who value aesthetics, SweepWidget has an advanced design editor and custom CSS builder. Once your contest is ready you can use a free hosted landing on Sweepwidget and/or embed it directly into your blog or website.
SweepWidget has 20+ API integrations with email marketing and marketing automation tools. This includes: Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Aweber, etc. They also have API integrations for Zapier, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Tracking Pixel, Stripe, and even have a native API.
SweepWidget makes it simple to track and manage all of your entries. You can randomly or manually select winners, disqualify/delete entries, and export all user information to a CSV file. Also, you can view/edit individual user actions from the advanced analytics portal.
SweepWidget has a free plan with unlimited entries. The pro plan offers more features and starts at $29/month. Overall, SweepWidget gives you all of the functionality you’ll ever need at a very affordable price.
Shortstack
If you’re looking for a powerful all-in-one tool for running your social media contests, consider using Shortstack.
You can run everything from Instagram & Twitter hashtag contests, to Facebook giveaways.
Great Lakes hosted a Facebook giveaway using Shortstack and generated over 200,000 entries, which helped them grow their Facebook fans by 200 percent in only three weeks.
Shortstack can also be used with other platforms such as Pinterest.
There are over 90 templates and 30 themes to help you create your giveaway campaign, drag and drop functionality that even the not so tech-savvy can use, and the ability to use custom URLs to suit your branding.
It also comes with detailed analytics, verified voting, and the option to restrict voting, making Shortstack a robust choice for your social contests.
Depending on your goal, you can increase engagement by rewarding your entrants with extra chances to win when they refer a friend. Or, if your goal is to collect leads, you can have your entrants share information such as their email address or what state they live in.
Shortstack also has an action-gate function to help you grow your list by having an entrant do something – like fill out their email address – to receive a discount or entry.
With the ability to promote your campaign across a variety of mediums such as social media, your blog, and email – and across any device – makes Shortstack a flexible and easy way to build your brand and get to know your audience.
Shortstack is an all-in-one tool in the sense that it allows you to create landing pages, and offers a boat-load of features to ensure your campaigns deliver results.
Plans are based on your social media goals. For a free trial, you get access to all the features the business plan has to offer. Paid plans start at $99/month and scale up based on your needs.
RafflePress
RafflePress is the top free social media contest tool and the best WordPress giveaway plugin. It comes with scores of features designed to help you run contests quickly, even if you only use the free version.
With the drag-and-drop builder and giveaway templates, it’s easy to design giveaways to boost your website’s performance.
The random winner generator makes picking a winner randomly and displaying it in the contest widget a breeze. Plus, it has a built-in giveaway rules generator to keep your giveaway compliant.
With RafflePress, you can run sweepstakes, photo contests to collect UGC, video contests, and more. Almost all entry methods are 1-click and offer the option to verify entries.
Here are some of the top features of the RafflePress free version:
- Gorgeous free giveaway templates
- Drag and drop visual giveaway builder
- Mobile responsive giveaway widget
- The builder and widget are optimized for SEO
- Integrates with major social media platforms
- Automate contest start and end times
- Prevent fraudulent entries with anti-spam and fraud protection
Upgrading to the pro version of RafflePress unlocks more powerful features to level up your giveaways.
The pro plan of RafflePress includes:
- Integration with popular email marketing services and CRM
- Customization and design options for giveaways
- Build a distraction-free giveaway landing page
- Go viral with the refer-a-friend social sharing giveaway action
- Extra giveaway templates for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
- Allow entrants to login to your contest via Facebook or Twitter
- Bonus giveaway actions like Facebook like and share, leave a comment, and more.
Woorise
Woorise is a popular free social media contest tool for creating free online giveaways. It has various features in the free plan like giveaway layouts, 1-click winner selection, fraud detection, and more.
To access more advanced features, you’ll need to use one of the paid plans. The paid version of Woorise offers these features:
- Drag and drop giveaway builder
- Responsive giveaway templates
- Polls, quizzes, and surveys functionality
- Run giveaways in specific regions with country restrictions
- Email marketing integration
- Giveaway analytics reports to track contest data
- Social buttons and viral sharing options
Outgrow
Outgrow gives you the opportunity to engage with your audience on social media using interactive content to stand out from the pack.
The platform is the only one in the list that allows you to use numerical calculators to captivate people’s interests.
For example, if you’re in the health industry, you can use Outgrow to create calculators for counting calories, computing for health risks, and more.
Launching campaigns using other interactive content like giveaways, quizzes, and forms is easy using pre-made templates optimized for conversions.
After participants complete the content, Outgrow can turn their input into dynamic charts and graphs. You also have the option to show the results in real-time so participants can keep track of their progress or display multiple results based on their answers.
Using any of its interactive content, you can generate leads and save them to a list in your email tool of choice.
Pricing:
The plans are grouped into two types: solo creators and teams.
There is a free plan for solo creators for 100 leads per month and four content pieces. The paid plans start at $22/month ($14/month paid annually) for greater limits and more features across the boards.
The plans under Teams are all paid starting at $115/month ($95/month paid annually) for a 7-day free trial period for even greater limits and additional team members.
Conclusion:
Social media contest tools are possibly the main component in managing contests. These tools can help you create contests, collect contest entries, and provide you with options for choosing winners. Much like every other online service, service providers in this space have plenty of competition. For this article, I used social media contest tools that are free or offer a free trial version of their service.