Any brand — no matter its size — needs a reliable tool to manage its digital marketing campaigns. A robust platform that automates workflows, brings professionalism and transparency to every action. Additionally, it helps drive audience engagement, boost reach, and capture leads. That’s exactly where Cool Tabs comes in. Not familiar with it yet? In this step-by-step tutorial, you’ll learn how to run a social media giveaway with Cool Tabs from start to finish — from creating your giveaway to announcing the winners — in a simple, professional, and fully transparent way.
Social Media Giveaways with Cool Tabs
What Is Cool Tabs? A Social Media Giveaway Tool
Cool Tabs is a SaaS platform designed for marketing professionals to create and manage lead generation and audience activation campaigns across digital channels.
Its key features include:
- Over 40 campaign formats — giveaways, contests, quizzes, surveys, gamification, and more.
- Brand monitoring tools (Social Listening & Analytics) and content curation (Social Walls).
- Direct CRM and DMP integration to connect campaign data with your existing systems.
It’s built for any brand, agency, or marketing professional that runs social media campaigns and needs to organize giveaways, contests, or engagement mechanics in a professional, compliant, and transparent way — whether you’re running your first giveaway or managing campaigns regularly.
Everything From One Platform
With Cool Tabs, you can centralize and optimize all your digital marketing campaigns and social media giveaways from a single dashboard:
- Run social media giveaways on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and manage entries effortlessly.
- Pick winners transparently, applying filters and generating a validity certificate and a winner video.
- Track campaign metrics and results in real time: entries, conversions, visits, and more.
- Monitor campaign activity to optimize lead capture and audience engagement.
Getting Started: Set Up Your Account and Launch Your First Giveaway
Sign Up
Go to the Cool Tabs website from your browser. You can sign up using your Google, Microsoft, or Facebook account.
Social login is fast and means one less password to remember. However, if you prefer, once registered, you can also add an email and password from your profile settings.
Plans
Cool Tabs works on a subscription model, but one of its biggest advantages is a 7-day free trial that gives you full access to all plans and apps — no commitment required.
Cool Tabs offers three monthly plans with no long-term contract: Stone, Gold, and Diamond. All include access to the giveaway apps.
- Stone: It’s the ideal plan if you run occasional giveaways and your main goal is to grow your social audience and drive engagement. It covers simple mechanics where participants interact directly with your posts.
- Gold and Diamond: Designed for campaigns focused on lead capture and audience activation. These plans unlock interactive content mechanics such as contests, surveys, games, and gamification campaigns. Diamond includes everything in Gold, plus white-label branding (no Cool Tabs watermark), a higher level of customization, and advanced features.
- Enterprise: The most comprehensive plan, built for large brands and agencies managing complex strategies and high campaign volumes.
You can activate your free trial or subscribe to a plan from the “Your Plan” section in your profile. After the trial, you can choose the plan that best fits your needs.
Once your account is set up, you’re ready to create your first giveaway.
Dashboard
Once you’re logged in, you’ll land on your account dashboard. From here, you can manage:
- Giveaway and campaign creation.
- Entry and lead monitoring.
- Real-time metrics and results.
User dashboard
How to Run a Social Media Giveaway with Cool Tabs: Step by Step
In this section, we’ll walk through the full process using the Instagram Giveaway app as our example. That said, Cool Tabs offers several giveaway apps to fit different needs:
Available Giveaway Apps
- Instagram Giveaway: Pick winners from comments, mentions, or hashtags.
- Facebook Giveaway: Select winners from comments and reactions.
- Multi-Platform Giveaway: Combine entries from multiple networks and run a single unified draw.
- List Giveaway: Import participants from Excel or CSV to run an online random draw.
Here’s how to run a social media giveaway with Cool Tabs, step by step.
Step 1 — Publish Your Giveaway Post
First, design and publish your giveaway post on Instagram (or whichever platform you’re using). Make sure to clearly state:
- The participation mechanic (comment, mention, hashtag…). Always check that it complies with the platform’s rules.
- The prize.
- The entry deadline.
- A link to the legal terms.
Once your post is live, head over to Cool Tabs to configure the giveaway.
Step 2 — Create the Giveaway in Cool Tabs
1. From your dashboard, select the Instagram Giveaway app.
Cool Tabs giveaway apps
2. Next, choose whether it’s an organic (unpaid) or sponsored (paid/promoted) post.
Instagram giveaway type options
3. Then, connect your Instagram profile and grant the necessary permissions so Cool Tabs can read and collect comments from your post.
Account linking process
Why do I need to connect my Instagram or Facebook account?
This is one of the most common questions from first-time users — and completely understandable. The good news: connecting your accounts to Cool Tabs is completely safe. When you grant permissions, you do so through Meta’s official APIs (Facebook and Instagram), which only allow Cool Tabs to access the data it needs to run your giveaway, collect comments, and validate entries.
Cool Tabs does not store your passwords or post anything on your behalf. Access is temporary and strictly limited to giveaway data. You can also revoke permissions at any time from your Facebook or Instagram settings, just like with any other connected app.
Step 3 — Configure Your Giveaway
- Give your giveaway a name.
- Select the giveaway post.
- Set the start and end dates for entry collection.
- Finally, save your changes — Cool Tabs will start collecting entries automatically.
Giveaway configuration in Cool Tabs
Step 4 — Add More Posts (Optional)
If you publish additional posts related to your giveaway — reminders, countdown posts, etc. — Cool Tabs lets you add them to the same giveaway so their entries are also counted.
To do this, simply edit your giveaway, select the new posts you want to include from the list, and save. All entries across posts will be consolidated in one place.
Step 5 — Review Entries
During the entry period, you can review all submitted entries from the Leads panel and remove any that don’t meet your giveaway rules.
Entries list panel
Step 6 — Pick the Winner
Once the entry deadline has passed:
- Go to the Winners section.
- Set the filters you want to apply, for example: comments must include a friend mention, entries must use a specific hashtag, exclude previous winners, count one entry per user or one per comment, etc.
- Once your filters are set, click “Filter”, specify how many winners (and alternates) you need, and Cool Tabs will randomly select them.
If you’re running a giveaway across multiple platforms, use the Multi-Platform Giveaway app to combine all entries and draw one or more winners from a single pool.
Winner Selection Filter
Winner Page and Validity Certificate
After selecting the winner, Cool Tabs generates a link to a public winners page that includes a validity certificate confirming the draw was random and transparent.
Share this link on your social channels so participants can verify the result. Make sure the page is set to public mode so anyone can access it.
From the winners section, you can also generate a short video with the result to post on Stories or your feed.
Finally, contact the winners directly via Instagram DM and make a public announcement if you choose to.
Cool Tabs validity certificate
Other Important Aspects of Your Giveaway
Beyond the technical setup, knowing how to run a social media giveaway the right way also means covering the legal and compliance side.
Legal Terms
Legal terms are the document that sets the rules of the game: who organizes the giveaway, who can enter, how to participate, what the prize is, when it ends, how data is handled, and more. They’re essential for building participant trust and reinforcing your brand’s professionalism.
Cool Tabs includes a dedicated app to generate your legal terms directly within the platform.
1. From the dashboard, click “Create campaign” and select the “Legal Terms” app.
Legal Terms App
2. Fill in the basic details:
- A name for internal reference.
- A public title that will appear in the shareable link.
- The legal terms text (For example, you can start from Cool Tabs’ built-in template and adapt it to your giveaway).
3. Publish: the app automatically generates a public URL you can share in your Instagram post, bio, or anywhere else.
Social Media Giveaway Rules: What’s Allowed on Each Platform
Before you launch your giveaway, it’s essential to know what mechanics are permitted on each platform. Rules vary, and not all actions are allowed everywhere.
Facebook Giveaways
- Giveaways can only be run from a Facebook Page. Not personal profiles or groups.
- Facebook prohibits asking users to share a post, tag friends, or follow the page as entry requirements. What you can ask for is a Like or a comment on the post.
Instagram Giveaways
- You cannot ask users to tag themselves in photos where they don’t appear.
- Instagram’s API does not allow automatic verification of likes or follows — these must be checked manually.
- You can ask users to comment, mention friends, or use a hashtag.
- You need a Business profile linked to a Facebook Page.
Twitter / X Giveaways
- Twitter prohibits encouraging users to create multiple accounts or repeatedly retweet the same post.
- You can run giveaways among users who retweet or use a specific hashtag.
Keep Learning: More Resources on Social Media Giveaways
If you want to dive deeper into how to pick a giveaway winner or set up more advanced campaigns, we recommend checking out the platform-specific tutorials in the Cool Tabs Help Center. You’ll find detailed step-by-step guides for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, as well as articles on compliance, legal terms, and best practices.
Visit the tutorials at help.cool-tabs.com.
Now you know how to run a social media giveaway with Cool Tabs — from setup to winner announcement — with complete transparency. In just a few clicks, you can create your giveaway, manage entries, and build a loyal community around your brand.
Ready to run your first giveaway? Start free on Cool Tabs.
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