10 Best Social Media Contest Tools For 2024 (Tried & Tested)

Social Media Contest ToolsPin

Are you looking for the best social media contest platform to grow your business online?

Contests are one of the best ways to increase sales, engagement, and grow your social media following.

Social contests include giveaways, raffles and sweepstakes and usually offer a lot of value to their target audience.

In this post, we’re comparing the best social media contest tools and apps to use in your business.

The best social media contest platforms & apps – summary

TL;DR:

SweepWidget is the best contest app for most users. It supports 90+ entry methods and 30+ social media platforms. It also includes a free plan. Embed your SweepWidget on any page of your blog. Includes dedicated WordPress plugin and a free plan.

Woorise is the best contest app for those who need additional lead generation functionality. Create landing pages for various contest and giveaway types. That includes Twitch contests, game key unlocks, and more. Also run quizzes, surveys, and create lead generation pages.

ShortStack is best for teams and agencies that need a feature-rich giveaway app to power their campaigns.

The tools above are going to be suitable for the majority of users but I recommend reading the rest of the article to find the right tool for you.

Remember – each of these tools either offers a free trial or a free plan so you can see if it is right for you.


1. SweepWidget

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SweepWidget is a powerful social media 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.

Pros and cons

  • Lots of supported contest entry methods
  • Generous free plan & affordable paid plans
  • Create unlimited contests & entries on all plans
  • Easy widget installation (embed codes & CMS plugins)
  • Speed up contest creation using AI
  • I’d have liked to see more widget customization options
  • A lot of the best features are gated behind higher-priced plan tiers

Pricing:

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.

Read our SweepWidget review.


2. ViralKit

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ViralKit is the world’s first fully AI powered contest builder. By entering just a few words, their intellegent AI will build your entire social media contest for you – from title and description to prizes and entry methods. Or, you have the option to build it yourself with their feature rich and easy-to-use contest builder.

ViralKit offers a whopping 250+ entry methods across 60+ social platforms – more than any other contest tool on our list. They make it simple to run multi-platform contests for Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, Twitter/X, Pinterest, Twitch, Discord, Telegram, and many more.

Also, you can add viral sharing (refer-a-friend), voting polls, collect customer reviews for your business, create custom forms, allow file uploads, require secret codes, ask for app downloads, and much more.

Easily update the styling, colors, fonts, choose multiple layout options, and add custom branding. You can also view the updates in real time.

ViralKit has many CRM integrations to connect with email tools. Including Mailchimp, Klaviyo, ConvertKit, Drip, Mailerlite, and MadMimi.

Their detailed user management section allows you can randomly/manually select winners, disqualify users, and filter users based on conditions. They also have in-depth traffic analytics section.

When it comes to security, ViralKit uses industry leading technology to prevent cheating and fake entries so you can protect the integrity of your brand.

Pros and cons

  • AI contest tool enables you to build giveaways in under 10 seconds
  • More supported entry methods than any other social media contest tool
  • Lots of API integrations to connect ViralKit to the rest of your marketing stack
  • Advanced analytics allow you to track your contest performance in real-time
  • Enterprise-level security features guard against fraudulent entries
  • No mobile app
  • You need to sign up for the expensive Enterprise plan to remove ViralKit branding
  • No WordPress plugin (you need to copy-paste HTML code to embed the widget)

Pricing:

ViralKit offers a free plan with unlimited contests and entries. You can also upgrade to a paid plan with extra features from $29/month.


3. Woorise

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Woorise is an all-in-one tool that allows users to create social media contests and many other types of lead generation campaigns.

With Woorise you can create a wide range of social contests, including Instagram contests and giveaways, Facebook giveaways, and Twitter contests. It can also be used to create contests for alternative social platforms including Twitch, and Youtube.

In addition to its contest creation options, Woorise also allows users to create surveys and quizzes for lead generation. This can help you to nurture leads, gain insights into your audience, and improve conversion rates.

Woorise also comes complete with a powerful landing page builder that can help you to host your giveaways. The landing page builder uses a simple drag-and-drop editor which makes it super easy to create professional and high converting landing pages in just a few clicks. Also, it includes a useful bio-link tool that is perfect for Instagram marketing.

Woorise is a particularly good option for agencies as it allows you to create separate workspaces in order to manage different accounts for brands and clients.

As you can see, this is far more than a simple competition app.

Pros and cons

  • The drag-and-drop contest builder gives you lots of customization options
  • Build all types of lead generation assets from one dashboard (contests, landing pages, quizzes, surveys, and more)
  • Lots of customization options
  • Offers flexible contest publishing options (pop-ups, in-chat, email, full-screen, etc.)
  • Affordable for agencies (workspaces & 5 team users included in Grow plan)
  • Pricing depends on the number of entries/month (very expensive if you want unlimited entries)
  • It has a bit more of a learning curve than other contest tools

Pricing:

Paid plans start from as little as $23/site/month.

Read our Woorise review.


4. ShortStack

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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 Instagram, and 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.

Pros and cons

  • Fantastic catalog of professionally-made contest templates
  • More flexible than most contest tools (especially the drag-and-drop builder)
  • Includes lots of agency-focused features like team collaboration tools, project management, etc.
  • Interesting gamification features (create puzzles, spin-to-win games, quizzes, and more)
  • Lets you set up IFTT automations (for example, to automatically trigger a ‘thank you’ pop-up following a contest form submission)
  • Very expensive starting price (3x the price of its competitors)
  • Despite the steep price, it still doesn’t come with unlimited entries
  • High learning curve compared to other tools

Pricing:

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.


5. Outgrow

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If you want a giveaway and social media contest tool that is multipurpose, then consider using Outgrow. Not only does it allow you to run giveaways and social media contests with ease, but it can also craft other forms of interactive content such as calculators, quizzes, chatbots and more.

Outgrow’s Development Studio is a highly customizable WYSIWYG drag and drop editor that can have your giveaway or contest up and running in a matter of minutes. And with over 1000 pre-optimized templates at your disposal, you can be sure that you’ll be generating leads and traffic for your website in no time.

Their editor focuses on 3 key sections: build, configure and analyze.

Build allows you to either start from scratch or use a pre-made template, but it also allows you to make your giveaways and social media contests professional by integrating your brand identity – add your logo, brand colors, assets and fonts to your content.

Configure focuses on optimizing your giveaway or contest with a variety of SEO settings, email notifications to yourself or users, set up integrations with other apps such as Active Campaign, Hubspot and Drip, and embed settings.

Lastly, the analyze tabs means you can check the analytics for your giveaway or social media contest.

Pros and cons

  • Create social media contests & other types of interactive content like quizzes, surveys, polls, and chatbots
  • Intuitive drag-and-drop editor lets you easily customize your contest widget
  • Huge library of pre-made templates
  • Excellent analytics covering all the important metrics
  • Conditional messaging & branching logic allow you to personalize your interactive content
  • Unlimited contests are only included in the more expensive plans (whereas this comes with entry-level plans on platforms like SweepWidget and Woorise)

Pricing:

There are 4 plans available each with different levels of access. They have a free plan with limited features but great for small solo creators. For more features and more leads per year you’ll need the Freelancer or Startup plan priced from $25-$85/month.

Each plan has a 7-day free trial available.

Read our Outgrow review.


6. Gleam

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Gleam offers a more robust contest and sweepstakes app than what you get with the likes of Rafflecopter.

With Gleam, you’re assured that each social media contest you run will result in growth of some kind. Whether it’s to grow your email list or social media following, launching a contest with Gleam will help you achieve your goals.

Adding entry methods is simple and quick to do with their drag and drop functionality. Select the type of entries you want – they offer a range of entry methods – and order them how you like.

One unique feature of Gleam is that, unlike many other platforms, there is verification of each action a user takes. Gleam tracks users on whether or not they complete the actions for your giveaway.

This helps you get qualified data and saves you time so that you don’t have to dig through entries that haven’t fulfilled all the requirements.

For the entrant, filling out a Gleam form is much quicker than other forms since some entries only require one click. For example, if one requirement is to tweet the giveaway, you just click once, and it’s done.

With other forms, you’re given a link to copy and paste or you have to wait for a pop-up.

If you want, you can also set some of your entry actions to be repeatable every day. You can reward your participants by allowing them to tweet or share on Facebook daily for more points.

Gleam also allows you to embed a YouTube video to be more interactive by showing your visitors what they will win or how they can enter your giveaway.

If you’re interested in running the giveaway on your WordPress site, Gleam has a WordPress plugin to help you. This makes it easy to add the form to your site.

Pros and cons

  • Intuitive social media contest builder
  • Supports ‘instant reward’ contests, which are great for driving sales
  • You can use the Social Galleries feature to run social media photo contests and curate UGC
  • Unlimited campaigns included in all paid plans
  • Email integrations aren’t included in the entry-level Hobby plan
  • Contest widgets can look a little dated

Pricing:

Gleam is available with four apps – Competitions, Rewards, Galleries and Captures. These can be purchased individually from $10-$29/month each. You can buy the full package for $97/month (discounts available for yearly subscription).


7. Vyper

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Vyper is a referral marketing platform that allows you to run several different types of social media contests:

  • Viral Contests/Giveaways
  • User generated Content
  • Milestone Contests
  • Leaderboard Contests

With Vyper’s super easy contest builder. You can create a campaign quickly, change the style and choose how you would like your contest to display (landing page, widget or embed).

The entire platform has been designed to get you more traffic, referrals, shares, email leads and customers.

Not only that but it is unique in the way that it engages with contest entrants. You can create a range of rewards (1st place, random winner, milestones etc) and set “bonus actions” to reward people for sharing, liking, following and referring.

And, Vyper doesn’t just handle contests – use it to run pre-launch campaigns, loyalty campaigns, ambassador programs, and more. You can integrate with your online store (e.g. Shopify) to track both leads and revenue generated via the platform.

Pros and cons

  • Supports most contest types including UGC contests, leaderboard contests, refer-a-friend contests, and more.
  • Allows for lots of customization and branding options
  • Very feature-rich
  • Supports reward milestones and bonus entries
  • A good choice for enterprises and marketing agencies
  • Very high starting price (5x as much as other platforms)
  • Some users report a worrying bug that billed them after canceling their account

Pricing:

Vyper starts from $149/month with up to 30,000 leads/month.


8. Wishpond

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If you’re looking to up your businesses’ lead generation game and need a tool that can handle social media contests as well as email campaigns and more, then Wishpond is a great choice. It’s an affordable all-in-one marketing platform that can help you to generate new leads, nurture the ones you have, and—most importantly—convert your leads to sales.

When it comes to social contests, giveaways, and promotions, Wishpond has a lot to offer. It allows users to create unlimited social promotions and offers a range of different contest types. There are 12 contest types in total and these include popular social media contests formats like photo and Instagram Hashtag contests. You can also use Wishpond to create more unique contests such as Pinterest contests, sweepstakes, and coupon giveaways.

Wishpond also provides a wide selection of optimized templates to make it easy to design and create professional-looking social promotions. Once your contests are live, you can also use Wishpond to track their performance and create in-depth reports.

Aside from social promotions, Wishpond can also help you to manage your lead generation efforts and create and automate email marketing campaigns. Wishpond comes complete with an easy-to-use landing page builder, as well as a useful funnel builder. You can also take advantage of the payment, popup, and form tools to optimize your customer journey and increase conversions.

Pros and cons

  • Very feature-rich platform with lots of marketing tools in one place
  • Build 12 different types of contests
  • Lots of professionally designed, optimized templates
  • Good real-time analytics and reporting dashboards
  • Some bad reviews report shady billing practices (locks you into a contract with a hefty cancellation fee)
  • All-in-one platform might be overkill if you only need to build social media contests

Pricing:

Wishpond prices start from as little as $49/month for up to 1000 leads. Wishpond also offer a 14-day free trial for annual plans.


9. Rafflecopter

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Rafflecopter is considered one of the simplest and easiest ways to get your contest running. Solopreneurs use it for its ease and speediness, and big brands use it for its reputable campaigns. You can launch a giveaway in under three minutes, and it’s easy to integrate into your site. Just copy and paste the code and decide where you want to display the widget.

It’s easy to incentivize your contest with one-click integration with all the popular social media platforms.

You can provide multiple options for contestants to enter your contest and you can also weight these actions. For example, if one of your goals is to grow your Twitter followers, you can offer more weight – 3 entries instead of 1 – to the entrants who follow you on Twitter.

Rafflecopter offers a free trial of their Basic, Grow, or Premium plan, making it easy to test out their service and see if it works for your business.

You can also use Rafflecopter on your Facebook page for contests geared towards your Facebook community.

Pros and cons

  • Very easy-to-use giveaway builder (good for beginners)
  • Straightforward widget publishing (just copy-paste an embed code)
  • Lets you set multiple ways to enter (with weighted entry points)
  • Easy entry management and winner selection
  • Analytics could be better
  • Email list integrations not included in the Basic plan

Pricing:

While the Basic plan has all the functions of the free plan, it allows prize images on your form for only $13/month. If you want one-click email list integration, you’re going to have to opt for the Grow plan at $43/month or Premium for $84/month, which also offers analytics as well as the removal of the Rafflecopter branding.


10. Woobox

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Along with Shortstack, Woobox is great if your marketing strategy uses Facebook contests.

But, Woobox is also perfect for other popular social platforms including Vine, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.

There are ready-made campaigns to help you get started, such as personality quizzes, poll posts, coupons, sweepstakes and more.

It’s easy to set up your social media contest. Woobox has drag and drop functionality to help you customize your campaign and infuse your branding elements, such as your marketing image.

Within the dashboard, you can set the message that’s shared to Twitter or Facebook when visitors enter your contest or giveaway.

Similar to Wishpond, when your contest is running, you’ll have access to your analytics to help you fine-tune your promotion for your campaign.

Pros and cons

  • Great for building Facebook contests
  • Can also create landing pages, pop-ups, and more
  • Good free plan and affordable paid plans
  • Pre-made campaigns for popular contest formats
  • Drag-and-drop widget customizer
  • Limited customization options
  • Voting fraud protection could be better

Pricing:

Woobox has a free limited plan and four paid plans. To get unlimited participants and campaigns you’ll need at least the Standard plan which is $32/month (billed annually). The two highest plans have 5-unlimited team members and access to all features.


Final thoughts

Running a social media contest is a great way to build brand awareness and create hype for your business. And they are great for lead generation.

The best social contest tool to create and run your content depends on your needs and goals.

For most users, SweepWidget will be the best option. This contest management software has a huge amount of features and makes it easy to embed giveaways onto your blog. It is also ideal for those who need a free giveaway app thanks to their free plan.

If you need a contest app that allows you to create dedicated landing pages for your contests, consider Woorise. They offer a limited free plan and have the capabilities to run more than just raffles, giveaways, and contests. You can also create lead generation pages, quizzes, surveys, and more.

ShortStack is ideal for teams and agencies. They include all the features you’ll need to run high-level social media contests. There’s a landing page builder, and email marketing included.

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