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best free social media contest tools

8 Best Free Social Media Contest Tools 2024 (Compared)

Written By: author image Stacey Corrin
author image Stacey Corrin
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.
     Reviewed By: John Turner
reviewer image John Turner
John Turner is the co-founder of RafflePress. He has over 20+ years of business and development experience and his plugins have been downloaded over 25 million times.

Are you looking for the best social media contest tools?

Running an online contest is one of the most effective ways to grow your social media followers, email subscribers, and website traffic. Social media contests can include raffles, giveaways, and sweepstakes and provide value to your target audience.

In this article, we’ll compare the best social media contest tools and apps to help you run social media contests online.

Summary: Best Free Social Media Contest Tools

If you’re in a hurry, take a look at our top 3 choices so you can quickly pick a free social media contest tool for your website.

ToolBest ForPricingKey Features
🥇RafflePressWordPressFree
$39/year
Sweepstakes
photo contests
UGC
hashtag contests
video contests
templates
🥈WooriseTeamsFree
$23/month
Social contests
landing page builder
surveys
quizzes
🥉AgorapulseSocial mediaFree trial
€49/month
CRM
analytics
Facebook app

How We Tested These Tools

  • We used them in our projects: We used several social media contest tools for our giveaway campaigns.
  • We tested the most popular tools: We tested some of the most popular contest tools on the market to see if they’re worth using. We analyze them based on ease of use, features, customization options, templates, and pricing.
  • We order them based on your needs: All social media contest tools are different. So, we analyze the features to help you decide if it’s the right choice for your needs.

Why Trust RafflePress

RafflePress is a leading authority on giveaways and contests, having helped countless businesses run successful campaigns. Our team of WordPress experts extensively reviews each tool we feature here and thoroughly tests them on real websites so we can recommend the best tools to achieve your giveaway goals.

Why Run a Viral Social Media Contest?

Running a giveaway contest is an excellent solution for boosting your business’s success online. According to the research, over 90% of social media users are more likely to engage with a brand that offers a contest or giveaway. So, if you’re interested in learning why you should be running a social media contest, take a look at the following benefits:

  • Boost social media followers: You can quickly grow your social media followers by asking them to follow you for a giveaway entry.
  • Drive traffic to your website: By getting people to share your giveaway on many social platforms, you can send more traffic to your website.
  • Grow your email subscribers: Getting users to subscribe to your newsletter for giveaway entries can grow your email list.
  • Increase brand awareness: You can ask users to refer friends to your contest with Instagram hashtags, Twitter hashtags, and more, which boosts your business awareness.
  • Generate leads to drive sales: You can use contests and giveaways for lead generation and convert leads into customers and sales.

For example, Smash Balloon used a social contest to grow its email list by 3,584 subscribers.

Now that you know how effective social media contests are for improving your business, let’s check out the best social media contest tools.

What Are the Best Free Social Media Contest Tools?

The best social media contest tools below have everything you need to make your next giveaway a viral success. They also work seamlessly with WordPress websites.

1. RafflePress

RafflePress is the best social media contest tools

RafflePress is one of the best free social media contest tools and the best WordPress giveaway plugins. It offers both free and paid versions, with the free version providing a solid set of features to create engaging social contests and giveaways.

With RafflePress, you can run sweepstakes, photo contests to collect user-generated content, hashtag contests, video contests, and more. Almost all entry methods are 1-click and offer the option to verify entries to avoid spam.

Rafflepress giveaway actions

You can add your own branding, images, and descriptions to make the giveaway match your website’s style. The plugin also includes pre-built giveaway templates to get you started quickly.

These templates are goal-based, helping you run a giveaway to:

  • Grow your email list
  • Increase your Facebook following
  • Get more TikTok followers
  • Grow your Twitter followers
  • Boost your Instagram audience
  • And more.

One of the best benefits of RafflePress is that it allows you to set up multiple entry methods for your giveaway. This includes entry methods such as following you on social media, subscribing to your email list, leaving a comment, and more. You can choose which entry methods are mandatory and which are optional.

Another great feature is the ability to enable viral sharing. This means that entrants can share your giveaway with their friends, family, and followers to earn extra entries, helping to increase your reach and engagement.

In addition, this powerful tool comes with an easy-to-use dashboard where you can see how many people have entered, which entry methods are most popular, and more.

With the drag-and-drop builder and giveaway landing pages, it’s easy to design giveaways to boost your website’s performance.

Plus, its winner generator makes picking a winner randomly and displaying it in the contest widget a breeze. You can also use its built-in giveaway rules generator to keep your giveaway compliant.

We use RafflePress religiously for all of our online contests for its ease of use and flexibility. It’s also a firm favorite for our sister brands.

Here’s an example of how OptinMonster used RafflePress for their birthday giveaway:

OptinMonster Birthday giveaway RafflePress

Pricing: The basic plan starts from $39. per year.

Expert Review: We recommend RafflePress for its beginner-friendly interface and easy contest creation features. It’s best for bloggers, small businesses, and larger eCommerce sites who want to run viral giveaways to boost reach, engagement, and leads.

2. Woorise

Woorise social media contest tool

Woorise is a popular free social media contest tool that lets you create different types of campaigns to generate leads and engage with your audience.

With Woorise, you can create social contests, such as Instagram giveaways, Facebook giveaways, and Twitter contests. You can also create surveys and quizzes to collect data on your audience and improve your conversion rates.

Woorise has a landing page builder that makes it easy to create professional-looking pages for hosting giveaways. The tool includes a drag-and-drop editor that anyone can use, even if you have no coding experience. It also has a bio-link tool that’s great for Instagram marketing.

One of the best things we like about Woorise is that it’s perfect for agencies. Users can create separate workspaces to manage different accounts for brands and clients. This means that you can easily keep track of your campaigns and provide clients with the best results possible.

Check out our Woorise review for more details.

Pricing: Starts from $23 per month.

Expert Review: Woorise is a good social media contest tool for Agencies looking to run and manage giveaways for clients. It offers separate workspaces, works with popular social networks, and includes surveys and quiz features.

3. Agorapulse

AgoraPulse social media contest tools

Agorapulse is a social media management tool, but it also allows users to run social media contests. Additionally, it offers a CRM, Facebook apps, and an analytics suite to help businesses grow.

One standout feature of Agorapulse is its reporting system, which provides insights on key metrics and is more intuitive than Facebook’s own analytics tools.

Agorapulse offers a range of Facebook apps, including quizzes, photo contests, sweepstakes, and more. Users can try out the Timeline contest for free and choose from sweepstakes, photo contests, or quizzes for their Facebook page.

With Agorapulse’s Facebook contest app, you can:

  • Create several different contest types, including quizzes and photo contests
  • Filter contest entries by likes, shares, or comments
  • Select a random winner automatically
  • Marketing automation for various giveaway processes (such as seeing which entry has the most likes)

While we found this free social media contest tool’s features limited, it’s a good choice if you’re only creating Facebook contests.

Pricing: Starts from €49 per month, billed yearly.

Expert Review: Agorapulse is ideal for brands wanting to manage their social media across multiple platforms while running compelling giveaways and contests. With its CRM and analytics, it’s easy to learn what does and doesn’t work for your marketing strategy.

4. Shortstack

shortstack free social media contest tools

Shortstack is a social media contest tool, platform, and email marketing tool that can help you run contests on social media. Additionally, you can use it for hashtag contests on platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, as well as giveaways on Facebook and Pinterest.

With over 90 templates and 30 themes to choose from, creating a campaign is easy with its drag-and-drop functionality. Additionally, ShortStack offers custom URLs to align with your branding.

This tool can help you increase engagement and collect leads in several ways. For example, entrants can earn extra chances to win by referring a friend, or they can share their email address or location. ShortStack even has an action-gate function that lets you require entrants to fill out information like their email address to receive a discount or entry.

ShortStack offers detailed analytics, verified voting, and the option to restrict voting, making it a robust choice for your social media contests. We also liked how the tool allows you to create landing pages, allowing you to promote your campaigns on various mediums like social media, email, and blogs.

While ShortStack offers a range of paid plans to cater to your social media goals, you can also try it for free to access all its features. The tool is an all-in-one solution for creating powerful social media campaigns that deliver results.

Pricing: With ShortStack’s free trial, you can accept up to 20 entries and 100 views per 30 days. Paid plans start at $99 per month.

Check out our ShortStack review for more details.

Expert Review: ShortStack is ideal for any brand wanting to grow its business with giveaways and contests. We found it straightforward to use; however, its pricing may be too expensive for smaller brands.

5. Woobox

Woobox free social media contest tools

Woobox is a 100% free social media contest tool and online contest platform that makes it easy to create online contests for your brand. It’s a great tool to use, especially if you plan to use Facebook. However, you can also use it for other platforms like Vine, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Woobox has pre-made campaigns to help you get started, such as personality quizzes, polls, coupons, and sweepstakes. We also found it easy to customize campaigns and add branding elements with the drag-and-drop feature.

You can customize the message that’s shared on social media when someone enters your contest or giveaway. And, like with similar tools, you can use analytics to improve your campaign.

Pricing: Paid plans start from $37 per month.

Expert Review: We liked how Woobox works easily with almost all social networks. The addition of personality quizzes and polls makes it a great choice for content creators and businesses of any size.

6. Wishpond

wishpond social media contest tools

Wishpond is a social media marketing platform. It allows you to run social media contests, email campaigns, and more. This platform is affordable and includes all the tools you need to generate new leads, nurture existing ones, and ultimately turn them into paying customers.

One of the standout features of Wishpond is its ability to help you run social media contests, giveaways, and other promotions. You can create as many of these as you want and choose from a range of different contest types.

There are 12 options in total, including popular formats like photo contests and Instagram Hashtag contests. You can also create more unique contests like Pinterest contests, sweepstakes, and coupon giveaways.

Wishpond makes it easy for us to design professional-looking promotions using optimized templates. It also provides tools to track performance and analyze the results of our campaigns.

In addition to social promotions, Wishpond can also help you manage your lead-generation efforts and automate email marketing campaigns. It has a user-friendly landing page builder, a funnel builder, payment, popup, and form tools to improve your customer journey and boost conversions.

Pricing: Wishpond offers a 14-day free trial, which is a fair amount of time to see if it suits your needs. Paid plans start at $49 per month.

Expert Review: We recommend Wishpond for larger businesses that need a comprehensive social media contest solution, thanks to its wealth of marketing features. It may be overwhelming if you only need a simple social media contest tool.

7. Gleam

Gleam free social media contest tools

Gleam is a marketing platform with several tools to grow your business. One of these tools is their Competitions app, which allows you to create social media contests for your brand.

With Gleam, you can run contests that will help you grow your email list or social media following. You can add different ways for people to enter your contest, and you can easily rearrange them with drag and drop.

One unique feature of Gleam is that it verifies if users have completed all the actions required for your giveaway, which helps you get accurate data and saves you time. It’s also quicker for users to fill out Gleam forms since some entries only require one click. Additionally, you can allow some entry actions to be repeatable daily for more points.

We particularly liked how Gleam lets you embed a YouTube video to show visitors what they can win or how to enter your giveaway.

Related: 10 Free Gleam Alternatives for WordPress Contests

Pricing: Starts from $79 per month for the full package or $10 per month for individual apps.

Expert Review: Gleam’s individual competition app is ideal for bloggers and content creators thanks to its inexpensive pricing. It’s easy to use and offers multiple entry options for different giveaway types.

8. Rafflecopter

rafflecopter free social media contest tools

Rafflecopter is another popular free social media contest tool that helps you run contests quickly and easily. Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or a big brand, Rafflecopter is a popular choice for its user-friendliness and reliability.

You can set up a giveaway in less than three minutes and add it to your website by copying and pasting the code. You can also encourage contestants to enter your contest through various actions, like following you on social media or subscribing to your email list.

We found that Rafflecopter’s one-click integration with popular social media platforms helped make this process even easier. We could even give different weights to different actions, such as offering more entries for following on Twitter.

Rafflecopter offers a free trial of their Basic, Grow, or Premium plan, so you can try it out and see if it’s a good fit for your business. Additionally, you can use Rafflecopter on your Facebook page for contests that are specific to your Facebook community.

Pricing: Starts from $13 per month.

Expert Review: We recommend Rafflecopter for bloggers who need a simple social media contest tool. Its free version is ideal for getting started; however, its best features are only available in paid plans.

Related:

Which Is the Best Social Media Contest Tool?

After testing and comparing the tools on this list, it’s our expert opinion that RafflePress is the best social media giveaway tool.

RafflePress is 100% free, has tons of powerful features, and is so easy to use, and you can create social media giveaways in an instant. Since it’s designed for use on WordPress websites, it’ll work with your WordPress themes and plugins. So, we think it’s the best viral contest software for WordPress.

If you want advanced viral sharing features and more, you can get started with RafflePress Pro here!

Tips for Running a Successful Social Media Contest

Running a social media contest is an excellent way to catapult your online presence. Now, to ensure get the desired results, follow these tips: 

  • Define Your Goals: Start out by outlining clear objectives. Are you trying to boost engagement, garner new followers, or expand your email list?
  • Select the Right Platform: Your target audience determines this. Should your campaign focus on Instagram, Facebook, or perhaps Pinterest? Keeping the interests of your audience in mind, choose the most effective platform.
  • Design an Attractive Prize: Choose a prize that’s irresistible and relevant to your audience. Remember, the reward must not only be appealing but also reflective of your brand.
  • Create Simple Participation Rules: To maximize participation, set simple and straightforward contest rules. People are more likely to participate if the process is easy yet transparent.
  • Promote your Contest: Leverage other social media sites, your own website, and email marketing to promote the contest. The more visibility, the more participation.
  • Engage with Participants: Interact with your audience during the contest. Answer their questions, like their comments, and create a memorable experience that transcends the contest period.
  • Measure your Success: Finally, measure the achievement of your goals. Use the built-in analytics tools of your chosen platform to determine engagement levels, new followers, and other metrics that illuminate the success of your contest.

For even more help with this, you can see our guide on how to run a social media contest.

Social Media Contest Tools FAQs

How do you keep track of social media contests?
The easiest way to keep track of your social media contest is to use a contest tool like RafflePress. It has a user-friendly dashboard to see who enters, how they enter, and when. This allows you to monitor your contest’s progress and easily choose a winner when it’s over.
Are social media contest tools safe to use for my business?
Most reputable social media contest tools, including RafflePress, are safe to use for businesses, as they prioritize user data protection and privacy. However, always do thorough research and read reviews before selecting a tool to ensure it meets your safety requirements.
How long should a social media contest last?
Ideally, your social media contest should last between 1 – 2 weeks. That way, there’s enough time for people to enter and not so much time that they’ll forget about it.
What other social media contest tools are there?
You can look at some other contest tools, including Vyper for contest leaderboards, Sweepwidget for milestone campaigns and instant coupons, Outgrow for chatbots and calculators, Kingsumo for web-based giveaways, and Easypromos for free Facebook contests.
Are there any limitations to using free social media contest tools?
While free social media contest tools can offer a variety of features, they may come with limitations, such as fewer contest types, reduced customization options, limited platform integrations, and minimal customer support. If you require advanced features, consider using a paid tool or upgrading to a premium plan.

There you have it!

We hope this article helped you find the best social media contest tools for your business. If you like, you can check out the best WordPress plugins to grow your business.

Thanks for reading, and if you liked this article, don’t forget to follow us on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for more great tips and tutorials.

author avatar
Stacey Corrin Writer
Stacey has been writing about WordPress and digital marketing for over 10 years and on other topics for much longer. Alongside this, she's fascinated with web design, user experience, and SEO.

Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.

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