8 Best FREE Social Media Contest Tools for Giveaways in 2024

I’ve worked in digital marketing for ten years, and I’ve found that contests and giveaways are fantastic ways to get people excited about your brand. They help you gain more followers, build your email list, and generally make things more interesting.

I’ve used them to celebrate special occasions, promote new products, and keep our audience engaged, and they always produce great results.

So, I’m thrilled to share my list of the top free tools for running social media contests in 2024. I’ve tried out each of these platforms myself to make sure they’re easy to use, have all the important features, and won’t cost you a fortune.

Why Run a Viral Social Media Contest?

Running a giveaway isn’t just about giving away free stuff— it’s a smart way to boost your online presence. Think about it: over 90% of social media users are more likely to interact with brands that host contests or giveaways. This presents a big opportunity to connect with your audience and see real growth for your business.

Here’s how a well-run social media contest can benefit your brand:

• Increase Social Media Followers: Giveaways are a great way to encourage people to follow you for a chance to win.
• Drive Website Traffic: Ask participants to share your giveaway on different platforms, which will lead people back to your website.
• Build Your Email List: Require people to sign up for your email list to enter the giveaway, and you’ll collect valuable contact information.
• Boost Brand Awareness: Get people talking about your brand naturally! Encourage the use of hashtags and offer incentives for referrals to spread the word.
• Generate Leads and Increase Sales: Contests and giveaways are a proven way to find new customers. Turn those leads into loyal customers and watch your sales climb.

See those results in action. For example, Smash Balloon used a social media contest to increase its email list by a whopping 3,584 subscribers.

How I Tested the Best Free Social Media Contest Tools

When choosing the best social media giveaway tools for this list, I focused on platforms that offered a strong set of features without requiring a paid upgrade. Each tool needed to tick these boxes:

• Essential Features: Sweepstakes creation, entry method options (social follows, email signups, etc.), and basic customization.
• User-Friendly Interface: The giveaway platform should be intuitive and easy to navigate, even for beginners.
• Free Plan Viability: The free plan must offer enough to get a giveaway off the ground, with reasonable limitations.

With those criteria in mind, let’s explore the top tools and giveaway apps that made the cut.

What Are the Best Free Social Media Contest Tools?

1. RafflePress: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for WordPress

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 many other types of online giveaways. Almost all entry methods are 1-click and offer the option to verify entries to avoid spam.

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 social media engagement goals.

One of RafflePress’s best benefits is that it allows you to set up multiple entry methods for your giveaway. These include 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 real-time analytics.

With the drag-and-drop builder and giveaway landing pages, it’s easy to design and optimize 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, and Recaptcha for fraud protection.

I personally use RafflePress religiously for all of our online contests because it’s easy to use and flexible. It’s also a firm favorite for other brands.

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

Pricing: The basic plan starts from $39.50 per year.

Best For: I 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: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for Teams

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 I 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 $29 per month.

Best For: 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: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for Facebook

Agorapulse is a social media management tool that also allows you 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 I found this tool’s features limited, it’s a good choice if you’re only creating Facebook contests.

Pricing: Starts from €69 per month, billed yearly.

Best For: 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: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for Customization

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. I 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: ShortStack’s free trial allows you to 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.

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

5. Woobox: Best Free Cross-Platform Social Media Contest Tool

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, such as personality quizzes, polls, coupons, and sweepstakes, to help you get started. The drag-and-drop feature also made it easy to customize campaigns and add branding elements.

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.

Best For: I 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: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for Lead Generation

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 me 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 $69 per month.

Best For: I 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 tool.

Related: Best Wishpond Competitors: My Honest Reviews

7. Gleam: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for Actions

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.

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

However, in a head-to-head comparison of Gleam vs RafflePress on the Elegant Themes blog, B.J Keeton states that “RafflePress is probably the more user-friendly option of the two and has a lower cost.”

Related: 10 Free Gleam Alternatives for WordPress Contests

Pricing: The full package costs $97 per month, and individual apps cost $10 per month.

Best For: 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: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for Simplicity

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.

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

Rafflecopter is free and 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.

Best For: I 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.

9. Sweepwidget: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for Versatility

SweepWidget is a versatile social media contest tool that prides itself on ease of use and a wide range of supported platforms. Whether you want to host a giveaway on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or even directly on your website, Sweepwidget has you covered.

Its user-friendly interface makes setting up contests a breeze. You can choose from various contest types, including sweepstakes, photo contests, video contests, and more. Sweepwidget also lets you customize the look and feel of your contest to align with your branding.

Sweepwidget integrates flawlessly with popular email marketing tools, making it easy to collect leads and grow your email list. Plus, it includes features like fraud prevention, viral sharing options, and detailed analytics to help measure your contest performance.

Pricing: Starts with a free plan, paid plans start from $29 per month.

Best For: Sweepwidget is a solid choice for businesses seeking a flexible platform with robust features and cross-platform compatibility. Its ease of use makes it appealing to those who are new to running social media contests.

10. VYPER: Best Free Social Media Contest Tool for Gamification

VYPER is a marketing platform designed to help you create viral giveaways, contests, and referral programs. It focuses on lead generation and gamified experiences to boost engagement and drive business growth.

With VYPER, you can create dynamic campaigns that include elements like leaderboards, milestone rewards, and bonus actions to incentivize participation and sharing. You can also offer rewards for referrals, encouraging participants to spread the word and expand your reach.

VYPER provides customizable landing pages, integrates with leading email marketing providers, and offers detailed analytics to track your campaign’s success. It also includes tools to prevent fraudulent entries and maintain the integrity of your contests.

Pricing: It starts at $149 per month. You can try it for free and only pay when you’re ready to start your campaign.

Best For: VYPER is a great option for businesses looking to supercharge their lead-generation efforts with gamified contests and referral programs. Its emphasis on engagement and viral potential makes it ideal for marketers seeking rapid growth. However, I found it’s pricing a lot higher.

Related:

• Rafflecopter vs Gleam vs RafflePress: Which is the Best Giveaway Tool?
• 10 Top Alternatives to Rafflecopter for WordPress
• Rafflecopter Review: Is This Giveaway Tool Worth It

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

There you have it!

I 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.

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.

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