The Best Social Media Contest Tools For 2023 (Comparison)
Question: what can help you gamify your social media efforts to generate even more engagement and buzz about your business from your audience?
If your answer is social media contest tools, then you’re correct!
While you don’t win a prize for getting it right, I hope you’ll settle for the next best thing: a list of the best contest tools to grow your brand.
At the end of this post, you should be able to decide which among the different contest platforms will help you run giveaways and contests on social media more effectively.
The best social media contest tools: run giveaways, raffles, and more
- SweepWidget – One of the best social contest apps around. Huge selection of giveaway entry methods, and very affordable. Free plan available.
- ShortStack – Best for social media contest landing pages. Includes emails for your giveaway campaigns.
- Woorise – Powerful and affordable contest builder that includes plenty of extra lead generation features.
- Outgrow – Create contests and giveaways easily. Includes plenty of extra lead generation features. Calculators, quizzes, chatbots, and more.
- Wishpond – A powerful all-in-one marketing and lead generation tool with a wide range of contest and social promotion features. Ideal for those who need an all-in-one marketing solution.
- Gleam – Great for solopreneurs and teams that need a social media contest tool with powerful apps and flexible pricing options.
- Vyper – A dedicated lead generation platform that is ideal for ecommerce brands. Includes social contests and referral marketing.
- RafflePress – The best WordPress contest plugin on the market.
#1 – SweepWidget
SweepWidget is a full-featured tool to create social media contests/giveaways, viral sharing campaigns, leaderboard competitions, and instant coupon/reward milestones. You can choose from over 90+ entry methods across 30+ social media platforms.
Building a contest with SweepWidget is super easy with their drag-and-drop builder. It comes with all of the necessary features to increase social media engagement, email signups, sales leads, and brand awareness.
Once your contest is ready, you can use your free custom landing page on SweepWidget, or embed it directly into your blog or website.
Easily manage all of your entries with the advanced analytics portal. It allows you to randomly or manually select winners, view every user action, disqualify/delete entries, and export all user information to a CSV file.
Integrations:
SweepWidget has 25+ integrations. There are 20+ email API integrations i.e. Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Madmimi, etc. You can also integrate with Zapier, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Tracking Pixel, Stripe, or use their robust native API.
Pricing:
SweepWidget has a free plan with unlimited entries. For additional features, the pro plan starts at $29/month.
Learn more in our SweepWidget review.
#2 – ShortStack
ShortStack is offers one of the most feature-packed contest platforms available. From hashtag contests to photo caption contests and games – ShortStack makes it easy to generate leads from social media contests.
The platform lets you build unlimited landing pages and contests by choosing from its selection of templates or building from scratch.
Thanks to its white-label capabilities, you can brand published pages and contests using custom domains that you can connect with the tool.
You also have the choice to embed the campaigns or make them appear as a pop-up on your website to maximize their exposure.
If you’re managing a team, you can give each one of them individual accounts and assign permissions to each.
Finally, you can track the success of your campaigns in real-time by checking the vital metrics on the platform’s analytics dashboard.
Pricing:
Paid plans start at $99/month ($79/month paid annually) for 10,000 entries and 50,000 views. Higher plans grant you more entries and views per month plus access to premium features such as hashtag, retweet, and video upload contests, white-label campaigns, and more.
You can create a free trial account for its most basic plan but for only 20 entries and 100 views.
Read our ShortStack review.
#3 – Woorise
Woorise offers an extensive list of features to help you build relationships with your audience across different platforms at very competitive prices.
Creating social contests, quizzes, surveys, forms, and others is a breeze using its responsive templates and its drag-and-drop builder. You can then just tweak the design and layout by dragging and dropping elements onto the page to achieve the look and style you want.
Once done, embed the widget on your Facebook Page, website, or blog and track the engagement level from your audience. See if participants are sharing the contest on social media and are generating referrals from it.
If you’re running contests, Woorise lets you automatically pick the winner using its 1-Click Pick Winner and Instant Win features so you can focus on growing and engaging with your list.
You can integrate your favorite email marketing tool onto your contest so all sign-ups will go straight to your desired list into your email platform.
Pricing:
Woorise has a free plan that lets you create unlimited campaigns and 500 entries a month.
Its paid plans starting at $29/month ($23/month paid annually) offer more monthly entries and better email support.
The latter plans provide premium features such as integrations, email notifications, and the ability to remove branding.
Read our Woorise review.
#4 – Outgrow
Outgrow gives you the opportunity to engage with your audience on social media using interactive content to stand out from the pack.
The platform is the only one in the list that allows you to use numerical calculators to captivate people’s interests.
For example, if you’re in the health industry, you can use Outgrow to create calculators for counting calories, computing for health risks, and more.
Launching campaigns using other interactive content like giveaways, quizzes, and forms is easy using pre-made templates optimized for conversions.
After participants complete the content, Outgrow can turn their input into dynamic charts and graphs. You also have the option to show the results in real-time so participants can keep track of their progress or display multiple results based on their answers.
Using any of its interactive content, you can generate leads and save them to a list in your email tool of choice.
Pricing:
The plans are grouped into two types: solo creators and teams.
There is a free plan for solo creators for 100 leads per month and four content pieces. The paid plans start at $22/month ($14/month paid annually) for greater limits and more features across the boards.
The plans under Teams are all paid starting at $115/month ($95/month paid annually) for a 7-day free trial period for even greater limits and additional team members.
Learn more in our Outgrow review.
#5 – Wishpond
Wishpond is far more than a simple contest app. It is a powerful marketing platform that includes a range of great lead generation features like social contests, a landing page builder, and more. With Wishpond, you can create unlimited social contests in a variety of formats.
The tool allows you to create everything from photo and hashtag contests to sweepstakes, coupons, and even Pinterest contests. Creating a contest or social promotion with Wishpond is easy, as they provide a catalog of highly optimized templates.
This will ensure that your contests and giveaways look professional and convert well. You can also use Wishpond to track your contests, analyze results and create reports.
On top of all the social promotion features Wishpond offers, users can also take advantage of useful tools like a landing page and marketing funnel builder, email marketing and automation, a popup and form builder, and more.
It has everything you need to improve your lead generation efforts on social media and beyond, and it’s perfect for businesses of all sizes.
Pricing:
Wishpond offers three affordable pricing plans that can be billed monthly or annually. The cheapest plan, Starting Out, starts from as little as $49/month when billed annually, and is suitable for up to 1000 leads.
The Everything You Need Plan is $99/month billed annually for up to 2500 leads.
If you need a higher lead limit, the Rapid Growth plan starts from $199/month for 10,000 and increases based on how many leads you select.
Wishpond also offers a 14-day free trial on annual plans.
#6 – Gleam
Gleam offers apps to help businesses growth-hack their way to more followers and a greater audience.
There are four apps contained in the platform: Competitions, Rewards, Galleries, and Captures.
You can run seamless and fair competitions complete with verified actions, built-in viral sharing, and 1-click action features.
You can also reward your audience with coupons or content for performing a particular action using Gleam.
The Galleries app allows you to launch user-generated content contests by allowing users to submit photos as a way of entering the contest. This works best if you want to impose your brand on visual-heavy platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, and others.
Finally growing your email list is made easy using Gleam’s responsive and highly customizable opt-in form templates.
Pricing:
Gleam gives you the option of signing up for a free account and paying only for apps your business needs. Price starts at $10/month for Competitions app and $29/month for Rewards, Galleries, and Captures apps.
If you want to avail of its complete features, the platform offers three paid plans starting at $97/month ($948/year annual payment).
The higher the plan, the higher the limits become for total monthly entries, winners, claims, storage, and conversions.
#7 – Vyper
Vyper is one of the best giveaway tools on the market. Not only can you run giveaways & social media contests, you can also run loyalty and referral campaigns.
Unlike the other tools mentioned here, Vyper also has a page builder to help you create a thank you and landing page for your contest.
With its easy-to-use drag-and-drop builder, even non-designers will have a field day creating beautiful designs for their giveaways.
You can also use the platform to create evergreen referral/loyalty/reward programs to help mobilize your customers and scale your brand. From here, you can reward customers with points for every successful referral or action taken by their referees.
Vyper works well with your paid media campaigns as it can increase your ROI by generating even more site traffic and brand awareness.
Pricing:
You can sign up for a free Vyper account to create campaigns from the site that you can publish and promote.
The paid plans starting at $149/month ($75/month paid annually) allows you to remove branding, use custom domains for your campaigns, and track generated revenue from the tool.
#8 – RafflePress
The RafflePress plugin is ideal for those who use WordPress – use it to easily create your viral giveaways and social contests.
You can build your contest by choosing from its mobile-friendly templates and editing them by dragging and dropping elements onto the contest. This way, you can bring your giveaway ideas to life and have full control over how to do it!
To help make your social media contests and giveaways fair, RafflePress has a 1-Click Entry feature that makes joining your campaign easy all while eliminating fraud entries.
The Viral Sharing feature allows participants to refer the contest to a friend to help them increase their chances of winning or earn points for every successful referral.
Finally, the plugin integrates with popular email marketing platforms so you can funnel participants down to your email list and run campaigns for them later.
Pricing:
Plans start at $34.40/year for a single site. Higher plans allow you to install the plugin on multiple sites and unlock other features such as integrations, social logins, giveaway landing pages, and more.
RafflePress is also a lifetime deal currently at a one-time payment of $314.30 for unlimited sites and all its features.
While RafflePress doesn’t offer a free trial to any of its plans, you get a 14-day 100% money-back guaranteed instead so you can get your refund if you’re not happy with the product.
What is the best social media contest tool for your business?
The business of social media is not a game, but it doesn’t mean you can’t have fun interacting with your audience using any of the above giveaway tools.
From the description for each tool, you should have a good idea on which among them you should use based on your needs.
Our top pick for contest platforms is SweepWidget because it provides everything you need to run contests and giveaways. It is especially affordable for small businesses and there is a free plan available.
However, Outgrow is the complete package for larger brands that needs a platform that goes beyond contests and giveaways – you have access to a lot of interactive content types you can use for lead generation. Quizzes and more.
Finally, RafflePress appears to be the best choice for WordPress developers and agencies who want to offer running a social media contest as part of their services given its generous lifetime deal.
Again, it’s best to take advantage of the free plans or trial periods of all the social media contest tools above to help give you a better idea on which platform will help you win.
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