Social media contests can help you to boost your social following, generate new leads, and drive website traffic, all the while raising awareness of your brand.
But in order to launch and manage an effective giveaway, you need the right tools for the job. There are a bunch of different contest tools and platforms out there that can help, but in this post, we’re going to be focusing on just one — SweepWidget.
SweepWidget ranked top of the chart in our roundup of the best social media contest apps.
In this in-depth Sweep Widget review, we’ll be taking a closer look at everything this platform has to offer, highlighting its pros and cons, and more.
What is SweepWidget?
SweepWidget is a cloud-based app that you can use to create and run viral giveaways, social media contests, competitions, and sweepstakes.
It’s one of the most popular giveaway tools on the market thanks to its competitively priced subscription plans, sophisticated feature set, and extensive entry method and platform support.
To date, SweepWidget has generated over 30 million leads and 100 million social engagements for hundreds of brands, including household names like Rakuten and Logitech.
It gives you all the tools you need to create beautiful custom giveaways and manage backend operations without any technical skills or knowledge.
You don’t need to be experienced in graphic design or know how to code to use SweepWidget — it’s totally beginner-friendly.
Aside from the basic giveaway setup stuff, you can also use SweepWidget to implement advanced features that improve the virality of your giveaway campaigns, including gamification features like multi-tiered prizes and leaderboards. We’ll talk more about these later.
What features does SweepWidget offer?
The SweepWidget user interface is refreshingly simple. When you first log in, you’ll be brought to the Dashboard area.
From the left-hand side, you can access things like integrations, support, and your account settings. But pretty much everything you’ll need to do on a regular basis to set up your giveaway campaigns happens in the New Giveaway tab. Click that to get started.
The first thing you’ll need to do is enter some basic information about your contest, like the prize title and description, the start and end date you want it to run between, and the number of winners. The number of winners you can have will depend on which plan you’ve signed up for. Enterprise plan users can have unlimited winners.
From here on out, you can change the settings and design of your contest and utilize different features in order to set up your giveaway exactly the way you want to run it. Here’s an overview of everything you can do.
Fraud prevention
Under the Security Settings tab, you can toggle fraud prevention settings on and off. This is one of the most essential features in any giveaway tool as it helps you to prevent your visitors from cheating by stopping them from entering multiple times.
You can choose how strict you want these settings to be. The Weak option will validate all emails to safeguard your list. The Standard level will do the same, plus device fingerprinting for added security. Choosing the Strong option will also activate advanced ‘device fingerprint’ technology in addition to the above. To activate the Strict level (the most advanced security features), you’ll need a Premium subscription.
You can also choose how many email addresses each entrant can use, block email addresses from high-risk domains, disallow VPN usage, and enable/disable two-factor authentication (Premium/Enterprise plans only).
And, SweepWidget goes way above and beyond its competitors by using advanced device fingerprinting technology. This security method checks for potential fraud by scanning 300+ data points from each user.
In fact, it’s the same technology that big players like Google, Facebook, and Amazon use. This is especially necessary for incentive-based contests where users try to cheat. It prevents fake entries, duplicate entries, fake referrals, bots, suspicious users, and much more.
So, if legitimate entries are essential for you, this will ensure people actu