How to run fair giveaways on Instagram

The Problem

Giveaways are one of the best ways to grow your following and engage your audience, but they are hard to do right and in a way that meets the high standards of public and legal scrutiny.

Ineffective Giveaways Processes

You may be surprised to learn that most giveaway apps don't fully validate the criteria for the giveaway. They may say they do, but they don't. This unknowingly leads hosts to run unfair giveaways that they get called out for later.

Unethical Giveaways

We've seen it all too often, giveaways where winners aren't chosen fairly. Yuck! This unethical behavior breaches our trust and makes us question all other giveaways we participate in.

Illegal Giveaway Tools

Most giveaway tools aren't officially approved by social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, therefore do DO NOT have access to the official APIs. To get around this, they scrape content which violates the terms of service of social platforms, which can get your account banned without even knowing it.

The Solution

That's why we created POPSMASH. We seek to empower Creators, SMBs & Brands by removing the friction between them and their audience with powerful, elegant solutions that drive human connection. One of the ways we do this is by making it easy to build trust with ethical giveaways where valid winners are chosen fairly.

All POPSMASH giveaways are managed through the POPSMASH platform, from user entry to validation and random winner selection. POPSMASH is approved to use the official APIs and validates giveaway entries against the specified entry criteria and selects winners with a truly random algorithm. Want to learn more about how it works? Read on.

How random winners are chosen fairly

When it comes time to select a winner, we use the Mersenne Twister, which is a random number generator (to be specific, a deterministic random bit generator). It is called this because its period length is chosen to be a Mersenne prime.

We use this random method for a few key reasons:

• This method passes numerous tests for statistical randomness, including the Diehard tests and most of the TestU01 tests.
• This method has an extremely long period of 2^19937 − 1. While a long period is not a guarantee of quality in a random number generator, short periods, such as the 2^32 common in many older software packages, can be problematic.
• It is k-distributed to 32-bit accuracy for every 1 ≤ k ≤ 623.
• This method generally creates random numbers faster than true random methods. A study found that the Mersenne Twister creates 64-bit floating-point random numbers approximately twenty times faster than the hardware-implemented, processor-based RDRAND instruction set.
• This method is permissively-licensed and patent-free, which allows us to use it for POPSMASH at no charge.

The result is that you can be confident that with any giveaway where the winner is selected by POPSMASH the winner was chosen in a secure, truly random way with no undue influence. That's the level of fairness you deserve, don't settle for anything less!

Learn more about how to run better Instagram giveaways

Looking for a guide on how to do an instagram giveaway? You're in luck, we wrote the most comprehensive guide on how to run an Instagram giveaway here.