How to Keep Track of Instagram Giveaway Entries

Running an Instagram giveaway is one of the fastest ways to boost your engagement and grow your following, but managing all the entries can quickly turn that excitement into a logistical nightmare. That’s why we’ve put together this straightforward guide on how to keep track of Instagram giveaway entries. We’ll walk through manual methods for small contests, savvy spreadsheet tricks for growing brands, and powerful tools that automate the whole process from start to finish.

Start with Clear Rules: The Foundation of Easy Tracking

Before you can even think about tracking entries, you need to establish rules that are easy for both you and your audience to follow. The complexity of your rules directly impacts the difficulty of tracking. Complicated entry requirements mean more manual work and a higher chance of making a mistake. Keep it simple.

Common Entry Methods and Their Tracking Difficulty:

• Follow and Like: The simplest method. You just need to verify that anyone who wins also follows you and liked the post. (Difficulty: Easy)
• Follow, Like, and Comment: A very popular option. Tracking involves collecting all the unique commenters. (Difficulty: Easy to Moderate)
• Tag One or More Friends: This is where it gets tricky. If you offer an extra entry for each friend tagged, the tracking complexity grows exponentially. (Difficulty: Moderate to Hard)
• Share to Stories and Tag Your Account: The most problematic method for tracking. Since Stories disappear after 24 hours, you either have to check them constantly or ask for screenshots, both of which are incredibly tedious and prone to error. (Difficulty: Very Hard)
• Use a Specific Hashtag (UGC Giveaway): A great option for branding, but it relies on public user profiles so you can see the posts. You track entries by searching for the hashtag. (Difficulty: Moderate)

For your first few giveaways, stick to a combination of follow, like, and comment. Once you’re comfortable with the process, you can experiment with adding friend tags. Clearly outline every single step in your giveaway caption to avoid confusion and disputes later on.

Manual Tracking: The Pen-and-Paper (or Spreadsheet) Method

For accounts with a few hundred or a couple of thousand followers, manually tracking entries is totally manageable, and best of all, it’s free. All you need is some patience and a spreadsheet. Let's assume your giveaway rules are: follow us, like the post, and comment by tagging two friends.

Step 1: Set Up Your Spreadsheet

Open Google Sheets or Excel and create a simple tracking sheet. This will be your single source of truth for the entire giveaway. Create columns like:

• Username
• Comment Verified? (Y/N)
• Friend Tag 1
• Friend Tag 2
• Follower Verified? (Y/N)
• Total Valid Entries

Step 2: Collect Usernames from Comments

This is the most time-consuming part. Go to your giveaway post on your phone or desktop and start scrolling through the comments. For each unique user who commented:

1. Add their username to your spreadsheet. Be careful with spelling!
2. Verify the comment. Did they tag two accounts? You don't have to verify if the tagged accounts are real just yet, just that they tagged the required number. Mark "Y" in the "Comment Verified?" column.
3. Add the tagged friends' usernames to their respective columns.

This process sounds tedious, but with some good music or a podcast, you can power through it. Focus on getting all the commenter usernames into the sheet first.

Step 3: Verify They Follow You

Now, it's time to check the other rules. Since it's nearly impossible to check if every single entrant follows you, the common and accepted practice is to verify the winner after you've drawn their name. When you select a winner, the first thing you do is check their profile to confirm they are following you and liked the post. If they haven’t followed all the rules, they are disqualified, and you simply draw another name. This saves an enormous amount of time.

Step 4: Prepare the List for the Drawing

Once your giveaway entry period has closed and you've collated all the valid comments, it's time to create your final "drawing" list. If your rule was "one comment = one entry," this is simple.

• Copy the entire "Username" column and paste it into a new sheet or a simple text file.
• If you offered extra entries for extra tags, you’ll need to list a user's name multiple times. For example, if user @greatnessmaker had three valid entries, you'd list their name three times.

Now, copy this final list into a free online random name picker (like Comment Picker or Random Name Picker) and draw your winner. Cross-reference the winner with your spreadsheet to double-check their eligibility. If they’re good to go, you have a winner! If not, draw again.

Semi-Automated Tracking: Smarter & Faster Methods

If manual entry feels like too much, you’re in luck. There are several tools that can automate the most boring part of the process - exporting comments. This is a great middle ground that saves time without costing you money.

Using a Free Instagram Comment Exporter

Dozens of free web-based tools will scrape all the comments from a public Instagram post for you. Simply search for "free Instagram comment exporter" or "IG comment picker."

How it Works:

1. Find a Trusted Tool: Look for a tool with good reviews. Most reputable ones don't require you to log in with your Instagram account.
2. Input Your Post URL: Copy the URL of your giveaway post and paste it into the tool.
3. Export the Data: The tool will process everything and give you an option to export all the comments into a CSV or Excel file. Some will even let you filter out duplicate users automatically.

This instantly gives you a clean spreadsheet with usernames and their full comments, completely eliminating the painful manual data entry step. From there, you can easily sort, filter, and verify the rest of your rules.

Level Up with Spreadsheet Functions

Once your comments are in a spreadsheet, you can use simple formulas to make organizing an Instagram giveaway spreadsheet a breeze. Here are a few useful tips for Google Sheets or Excel:

1. Remove Duplicate Commenters

If your rules state only one entry per person is allowed, you don't want to count a user who commented 15 times. After exporting, just find the "Remove Duplicates" function in your spreadsheet software to clean your list of usernames instantly.

2. Count Friend Tags Automatically

Want to count how many friends someone tagged without reading every comment? You can use a formula to count how many times the "@" symbol appears in their comment. If the comments are in column B, you could add this formula in column C:

=LEN(B2) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B2,"@", ""))

This handy formula tells you exactly how many accounts were mentioned in that comment. You can then quickly filter for users who met the minimum tag requirement.

Fully Automated Tracking: Giveaway Management Tools

For brands that run frequent or large-scale giveaways, manual and semi-automated methods are still too slow and prone to human error. This is where third-party giveaway apps come in. These are paid services that manage everything from entries to winner selection.

Popular Giveaway Platforms:

• Gleam.io
• Woorise
• Wishpond
• RafflePress (for WordPress sites)

How They Work

Instead of having people enter directly on your Instagram post, you use the post to drive them to a giveaway landing page generated by one of these tools (usually linked in your bio). On this page, users provide their information and are presented with a checklist of actions they can take to earn entries.

Key Benefits:

• Automated Entry Verification: The app connects to Instagram's API to confirm if a user actually followed your account or liked a post. You don't have to check anything manually.
• Diverse Entry Options: Go beyond Instagram! You can award entries for watching a YouTube video, signing up for your email list, visiting a blog post, or following you on X (Twitter). This is golden for cross-platform growth.
• Fraud Prevention: These tools have systems to detect bots or fraudulent entries, ensuring a fair competition.
• One-Click Winner Selection: When the giveaway ends, you just click a button, and the app randomly and impartially draws a verified winner from the pool of valid entries.
• Email Collection: Most platforms allow you to make email newsletter sign-ups a high-value entry method, helping you build a valuable marketing asset long after the giveaway is over.

The main downside is cost. These services typically operate on a monthly or annual subscription model, but for businesses serious about growth, the expense is often well worth the time saved and the marketing benefits gained.

Final Thoughts

Choosing how to keep track of Instagram giveaway entries really boils down to your budget, audience size, and how much time you're willing to spend. Manual tracking works for small-scale contests, semi-automated methods using comment exporters save a ton of time, and comprehensive giveaway tools provide a hands-off, scalable solution for serious marketers.

We've found from talking to thousands of social media managers that no matter which tracking method you use, a giveaway always floods your DMs and comments with questions and excitement. Since staying on top of community engagement is vital for building brand trust, we built Postbase with a unified inbox. It lets our team see and reply to every comment and message from all our social platforms in one clean feed, ensuring we never miss an important question during or after a busy giveaway campaign.