Facebook giveaway picker

Both Rules Arrive Switched On

Every other draw tool on this site opens with one filter running. The Facebook giveaway picker above opens with two: one entry per person, and must tag a friend, both already ticked before you have pasted anything. That is the right default for a giveaway with published conditions, and it is also why the first thing a lot of people see is a large number of comments and an eligible count of zero.

That is not a fault. It is the tag test doing exactly what it was told, and the reason it happens on Facebook in particular is worth understanding before you touch anything else.

What the Facebook Giveaway Picker Adds

It is the same draw as the plain comment picker with two things bolted on.

A tag test, so a giveaway that required people to tag a friend can be filtered rather than checked by eye. And a runners-up field, so the result card names a winner and then a reserve list underneath, all inside one screenshot.

Everything else is the same: paste the comments, set the rules you announced, and the card shows the platform, the winners, the filters used and both counts.

The Tag Test Is Looking for an At Sign

Here is the mechanism, and it explains the zero.

After the entrant’s own name has been taken off the front of the line, the tag test asks one question: is there an at sign followed by a letter, a number, a full stop or an underscore anywhere in what is left. That is the entire check.

On Facebook, a properly made tag does not survive a copy as an at sign. When somebody uses the mention feature, the comment displays their friend’s name as a piece of ordinary text, and copying the thread gives you that name with no at sign attached to it. So a genuinely tagged comment arrives in the paste box looking untagged, and the filter removes it.

The symptom is unmistakable once you know it. Comments in the hundreds, Excluded matching it almost exactly, Eligible at or near zero.

Two ways forward, and both are legitimate.

• Untick the tag test and check by eye. Filter on the keyword and one entry per person, then look down your own paste for the entries that clearly named somebody. That is honest, it applies the rule you published, and it is realistic up to a few hundred lines.
• Put the at signs back before you paste. If you are working in a spreadsheet anyway, prefixing the tagged names is a find and replace, and the filter then does what you expected.

What you should not do is quietly drop the tag rule because the tool made it inconvenient. You published it, and somebody counted on it.

Deciding Whether the Tag Rule Is Worth Having

Since it costs you work either way, it is worth asking what the rule buys.

A tag requirement exists to make the giveaway spread, and it does. It also guarantees that a meaningful share of your entrants tagged somebody at random, that some tagged the same person eleven times, and that the friend who was tagged mostly never sees it.

No filter can tell any of that apart from a real recommendation, because a pasted comment carries no information about whether the tagged account exists, is a different human, or ever looked. The tag test checks that a tag is present, and that is genuinely all it checks.

For a small local giveaway, a keyword and one entry each is often the better rule: fewer entries, less noise, and a list of people who actually wanted the prize rather than people performing a ritual.

Runners-Up Are the Point of Giveaway Mode

The field opens on two, and drawing them at the same time as the winner rather than later is the whole reason to use this mode.

The obvious use is insurance. A winner who never replies is the one failure a draw cannot show you on screen, and it happens often: the account went quiet, the person deleted the comment, the notification was never seen. Having named a reserve inside the same screenshot means you can move on without running a second draw that looks like a second chance for somebody you preferred.

The less obvious use is the better one. Runners-up are a short list of people who entered, are still interested, and have just been told they did not win. Sending them something small the same day is the single highest converting message a giveaway produces, and almost nobody sends it.

Set the number before you draw. Two is a sensible reserve list. Ten stops being a reserve list and starts being a second prize you have not announced.

Announce the Rules Before the Post Goes Up

The note under the panel says it plainly, and it names the real cause of trouble: disputes come from changing the rules after the entries land, not from the shuffle.

Nobody has ever accused a business of rigging a random number generator. What they accuse you of is excluding them for a reason you did not publish, and that accusation is usually correct, because the rule was invented at the moment it became convenient.

So write the conditions into the caption before anything goes live. What to comment, whether a tag is required, one entry each or unlimited, when it closes, when the winner is announced. Then apply exactly those, including the ones that turn out to be awkward.

The rules line on the result card is what makes that verifiable afterwards, because it prints the filters that actually ran rather than the ones you meant to run.

Publish a Claim Window

The one thing to add to your rules that most people forget.

Say in the post how long a winner has to reply and what happens if they do not. Forty eight hours and then the first runner-up is a perfectly normal condition, and having said it in advance turns an awkward second announcement into the thing you told everybody would happen.

Without it you are choosing between chasing somebody who has stopped reading, and quietly promoting the runner-up in a way that looks like you changed your mind.

What the Card Proves

The result card carries the platform, the winners, the runners-up, the filters used and both counts, and that combination is the whole reason to screenshot it.

A name on its own proves nothing. A name beside the words one entry per person and comment must tag a friend, drawn from 118 eligible entrants out of 214 comments, is a claim that anybody can check against the thread themselves.

Take the screenshot before you touch another field, because editing anything afterwards retires the result and nothing is saved. And press the button once: pressing it again names somebody else, and the only thing that makes a draw honest is publishing the rules first and keeping the first result.

What the Facebook Giveaway Picker Cannot Do

• It cannot see your post. No connection to Facebook, no fetching, no login. Everything it knows is what you pasted.
• It cannot check a like, a share or a follow. Those conditions have to be verified by hand on the person you drew.
• It cannot verify a tag beyond the at sign. Not whether the account exists, not whether it is a different person, and not whether they ever saw it.
• It cannot tell two accounts belonging to one person apart. Nor a real name from an invented one.
• It never sees a hidden or deleted comment. Anything your own filters removed, or anything deleted before you copied, was never in the draw.
• Nothing is stored. No log and no link you can send anybody. The screenshot is the only record.

The panel itself is rendered on the server before any script runs, so the fields, the toggles and the rules line are all readable immediately. Only the shuffle waits for the button.

The Promotion Is Yours to Run

Meta’s own promotion guidelines put the responsibility on the promoter. The official rules, who may enter, the prize and everything lawful about it are yours to write and yours to answer for, and there is wording those guidelines have long asked promoters to include about the promotion not being sponsored or administered by the platform.

Read the current version on Meta’s own page rather than copying a caption off a competitor, because that wording has changed more than once and a competitor’s post is not evidence of anything.

Everyone Who Entered Is a Lead

Two hundred people commented and one of them got a prize. The other 199 raised their hand in public for something you were giving away, and by Monday most businesses have done nothing with any of them.

That is the actual return on a giveaway, and it is entirely in the follow-up. With DMly the winner gets a message and the runners-up get an offer the same day, automatically, which turns a spike in comments into a list of people you have spoken to.

If your draw does not need a tag test or a reserve list, the simpler Facebook comment picker is the one to use. For the same job on other platforms, there is the Instagram comment picker and the TikTok comment picker.