How to Create a Direct Sweepstake on Instagram and Choose Winners

1. Introduction.

To create a direct draw among those participants who like or comment one or more of your photos or videos, choose our Instagram Sweepstakes app. You can run actions like: "comment the post and mention one or more friends". You can choose one or more of them. Keep in mind that, due to the changes on Instagram's API, it's not permitted to run a sweepstake in which the participants need to like your post/s or follow your profile.

2. Step by step.

1. Access Cool Tabs, create a new campaign and choose the Instagram Sweepstakes app.

Choose the Instagram user you want to run the contest with. If the profile which you want to make the draw does not appear, follow the steps in this tutorial to add it.

By clicking on "I cannot find my Instagram account", we will see the options to create the draw with company profile or personal profile. In this tutorial, we explain how to convert my personal Instagram profile to a company profile.

Select the dates by which the data will be collected:

Choose the post or posts in the following step.

Instagram Sweepstake also allows you to edit your sweepstake and include new posts. This is very useful if we give a reminder of the contest on Instagram. This way, all the comments made on the new posts will be collected as well.

To include new posts, you just need to access your campaign and select the post/s you want to add.

2. To choose the winner or winners, click on 'Choose winners' on the 'Winners' tab that you'll find on the left side of your screen.

*It is important to remember that sometimes, when we create an Instagram sweepstake, the number of comments that Cool Tabs shows doesn't match the number we can see on the Instagram app. Check out this tutorial for more information: Why my Instagram sweepstake doesn't show all the comments?

You can select the winner or winners among the users that meet the following rules (you can select or leave empty the filters depending on the requirements):

- Participants who have mentioned one or more friends (up to 10 mentions).

- Participants who have included the hashtag, word/s or mention required in their comments. You can write variuous words separated by spaces, so the comments which include any of them are filtered.

Thus, the winner or winners will be chosen among all the participants that meet all the requirements we have filtered. From example, the participants who have left a comment, mentioned three friends and included a hashtag.

Besides, if it's a draw among users who have commented your post, you have the possibility to give extra ballot papers to those who have commented or answered with a particular word. Also, in a draw among comments, you can give ballot papers to those who have included a particular answer. Give extra ballot papers is available from our Gold Plan).

We remind you that with our "Blacklist" functionality, you can block users to avoid them being winners.

Once you've chosen the winner/s, you'll get a link to a public winner's webebpage, so you can share the results with all your followers. You can also custom your winners page with a custom header.

3. Other specifications.

You can only make direct Instagram Sweepstakes among those users who comment on a post, always in public profiles.
You can also make a contest with a promoted post or among posts that belong to different profiles (very useful to make campaigns with influencers).