What Types of Giveaways Can be Done on Social Media?

1. Introduction.

2. Facebook Giveaway.

2.1. Allowed actions on Facebook.

2.2. Prohibited actions on Facebook.

3. Instagram Giveaway.

3.1. Allowed actions on Instagram.

3.2. Prohibited actions on Instagram.

3.3. Technical limitations of Instagram's API.

4. Twitter/X Giveaway.

4.1. Allowed actions on Twitter/X.

4.2. Prohibited actions on Twitter/X.

4.3. Technical limitations of Twitter/X's API.

5. Other specifications.

6. Related content.

1. Introduction.

2. Facebook Giveaway.

First of all, keep in mind that giveaways can only be held on a fan page (business or brand page). It is not possible to hold giveaways on personal profiles or Facebook groups, whether public or private. 

2.1. Allowed actions on Facebook.

These are the dynamics that Facebook allows and that you can manage with Cool Tabs' Facebook Giveaway app:

• Comment giveaway among users who comment on your post.

• Likes giveaway among users who give a 'Like' or other reaction (Love, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry).

• Combined giveaway of likes and comments on the same post.

• Giveaway with keyword filter: when selecting winners with the Facebook Giveaway app, you can filter comments that include specific words to verify that participants have followed the giveaway instructions.

• Giveaway on sponsored ad (Facebook Ads) among users who react and/or comment on the sponsored post. For this case, use the Sponsored Facebook Giveaway app.

• Photo giveaway: You can run a giveaway among users who comment with a photo on the giveaway post, though this isn't very common.

What about friend mentions?

Asking participants to mention a friend in the comments is common and allowed, as long as they are not explicitly asked to tag them (see below). Keep in mind that Facebook's API does not collect information about mentions in comments, so it is not possible to filter them automatically with Cool Tabs. You will have to manually review the winner's comment to verify that they met that requirement.

2.2. Prohibited actions on Facebook.

According to Facebook's promotion policy, the following dynamics are explicitly prohibited:

• Sharing the post as a condition of participation. Phrases like "share it on your wall to participate" or "share it on a friend's wall" are not allowed.

• Tagging friends in the post to participate. The policy prohibits requiring or encouraging participants to tag other people to promote the giveaway. You can ask them to mention a friend in the comments, but not to tag them.

• Asking to follow the page as a requirement to participate. Facebook's policy prohibits incentivizing users to 'Like' a page in exchange for participating in a promotion. If verifying that someone follows you is a requirement of your giveaway, you will have to check it manually after selecting the winner.

• Hashtag giveaways: It is not possible to hold a giveaway on Facebook where users participate by posting on their own wall with a brand hashtag.

• Giveaways in Reels: Meta's API does not provide data from Facebook Reels, so automated giveaways in that format are not possible.

To hold a likes and/or comments giveaway, follow this tutorial: How to create a giveaway on your Facebook wall and select winners.

If you are going to hold the giveaway on comments and/or likes of a sponsored post (with an ad campaign), follow the steps indicated here: How to create a giveaway on a sponsored Facebook ad and select winners.

3. Instagram Giveaway.

Keep in mind that giveaways can only be held on Instagram Business profiles, not personal ones. Additionally, they must be linked to a Facebook fan page. If your Instagram account is not linked, here we explain how to add an Instagram account in Facebook Business to hold a giveaway or monitoring.

3.1. Allowed actions on Instagram.

3.2. Prohibited actions on Instagram.

According to Instagram's promotion policy:

• Asking users to tag themselves in photos in which they do not appear. This is one of the few explicit prohibitions in Instagram's policy. Asking them to tag themselves in comments is allowed; what is not allowed is to ask them to tag themselves directly in the giveaway photo or video if they do not appear in that content.

• Giveaways in Stories Ads: Instagram's API does not allow collecting responses or reactions in sponsored Stories, so automating this type of giveaway is not possible.

3.3. Technical limitations of Instagram's API.

Beyond what Instagram's policy allows or prohibits, its API imposes additional limitations that affect what Cool Tabs can collect automatically:

• Followers cannot be automatically verified: if you require participants to be followers to enter, you will have to check this manually after selecting the winner.

• Likes are not accessible: Instagram's API does not provide information about users who have liked a post, so it is not possible to hold a likes giveaway on Instagram as you can on Facebook. You can ask for it as a participation requirement, but you will have to check it manually after selecting the winner.

• Only comments from public profiles are collected: it is not possible to access comments from users with private profiles.

• Nested replies in comments may not be fully collected due to API limitations. If your giveaway dynamic involves many chained comments, there may be discrepancies between the number shown by Instagram and the number collected by Cool Tabs.

   

If you are going to hold a giveaway that involves commenting on the giveaway post and/or mentioning friends, follow this tutorial: How to create a direct giveaway on Instagram and select winners.

If you want to hold the giveaway on comments and/or mentions made on a sponsored post (with an ad campaign), follow this other tutorial: How to create a giveaway on a promoted post on Instagram and select winners.

If your giveaway requires participants to upload a photo or video to their feed, including a hashtag, follow the steps indicated here: How to create monitoring of an Instagram hashtag.

If the participation conditions are to upload a photo or video with a hashtag and also mention your account, follow the instructions in this tutorial: How to create a hashtag + mention giveaway on Instagram.

4. Twitter/X Giveaways.

4.1. Allowed actions on Twitter/X.

Twitter's promotion policy prohibits encouraging a user to create many accounts to participate in a giveaway. It also prohibits encouraging them to make many retweets repeatedly, for example, sharing a post several times on the same day. 

At the moment, it is also not possible to hold a giveaway where participation requires mentioning one or more friends. 

These are the dynamics that Twitter/X allows and that you can manage with Cool Tabs' Twitter Giveaway app:

• Retweets giveaway among users who retweet one or more tweets from your profile. This is the most common dynamic on Twitter/X.
• Mentions and hashtags giveaway among users who post a tweet mentioning your account and including your giveaway hashtag. This type of giveaway is managed through Cool Tabs' Social Listening tool.

4.2. Prohibited actions on Twitter/X.

According to promotion guidelines:

• Asking for repeated retweets on the same day or massively. Phrases like "who retweets the most times wins" or dynamics that encourage posting the same tweet multiple times violate X's spam rules and may cause tweets to be automatically filtered from search results.

If you want to select a winner among users who follow you and/or have retweeted a post, follow these instructions: How to create a direct giveaway on Twitter and select winners.

If you want to hold the giveaway among users who have posted a tweet including a specific hashtag, follow this other tutorial: How to create monitoring of a Twitter profile.

4.3. Technical limitations of Twitter/X's API.

Twitter/X's API imposes significant technical restrictions that directly affect how Cool Tabs collects entries:

• Maximum age of 7 days: the API only allows collecting retweets and tweets from posts less than 7 days old from the date the giveaway is created in Cool Tabs. It is essential to create the giveaway in Cool Tabs immediately after publishing the tweet to avoid losing entries prior to that moment.
• Only the last 100 retweets before creating the giveaway are collected: any retweet before that point and outside that window will not be collected by the app.
• Maximum of 20,000 retweets per giveaway.
• The API is based on relevance, not exhaustiveness: Twitter/X's search engine prioritizes posts it considers relevant, so not 100% of participants may appear. Cool Tabs estimates that usually more than 85% of retweets are collected, but discrepancies may occur, especially with new or low-activity accounts, or when tweets include emojis or special characters.
• Giveaways on private profiles are not possible: the giveaway must be published from a public profile account.
• Automatic filtering by followers is not possible on all plans: verifying if the winner follows your account requires manual checking, except on higher plans.
• App usage limit: the Twitter Giveaway app is available only in Cool Tabs' paid plans and allows a maximum of 4 giveaways per month per account. The Social Listening tool for Twitter, necessary for hashtag giveaways, also has an additional cost and a limit of 10,000 tweets monitored per month.

5. Other.

Why can't you do, for example, Instagram giveaways with the post URL using Cool Tabs? At Cool Tabs, we read data so you can hold your giveaways through the official APIs of the different social networks. Other platforms resort to scraping.

This technique allows them to extract data from social media websites through software in an unofficial and ethically questionable way.

Keep in mind that, due to the growing demand for greater privacy and data protection by users, as well as compliance with regulations, social networks have been forced to make changes to their APIs, limiting data collection.

Moreover, many times, social networks themselves prohibit access to their content through this technique in their usage policies.

For all these reasons, we discourage the use of platforms that resort to scraping to hold giveaways. It offers greater transparency and security to your followers.

If you have a dynamic in mind for your social media giveaway and want to ask us something, do not hesitate to contact us at the email help@cool-tabs.com or through our web chat.

6. Related content.

How to create a giveaway on Instagram and select winners.

How to create a giveaway on Facebook and select winners.

How to create a giveaway on Twitter and select winners.

How to create a multiplatform giveaway with Cool Tabs.