Announcing a winner the right way can open the door for new entrants. Alternatively, if you do it poorly you will lose trust from your current customers and the excitement of winning will decrease. In this guide we go over the most effective way to build trust and a larger audience from promoting competition winners. Is it still best to live stream your draws? Or, is there a better way in 2025, we find out!
Which Platform Do Top Competition Sites Use to Announce Winners?
You can create an amazing announcement livestream, if you broadcast it on a platform that your customers don’t use, it’ll be worthless. We have conducted a study on the top 14 competition businesses in 2025 to see where the leaders are announcing their winners.
| Competition business | Announcement Platform |
| 7 Days Performance | Facebook & YouTube |
| Bounty Competitions | |
| Kilted Competitions | |
| Competition Fox | |
| Jammy Competitions | Facebook, YouTube & Twitch |
| Canny Comps | |
| Click Competitions | |
| High Peak Competitions | |
| Highland Holiday Giveaway | |
| Elite Competitions | Facebook & YouTube |
| Storm Competitions | |
| Pristine Competitions | |
| Nitrous Competitions | Facebook & YouTube |
As you can see, the vast majority announce competition winners via Facebook. With some competition businesses opting to also post on the likes of YouTube and even Twitch!
Why Facebook?
We believe this is due to the competition industry originally starting by hosting raffles via Facebook groups/pages. This built up a significant audience, which can still be utilised today, even if you’re using a website to host your competitions. If you’re not actively posting on Facebook as a competition business, you are missing out on the largest pool of possible entrants. We highly recommend to use Facebook as the primary platform for announcing winners.
YouTube and Twitch seem to be used only because the businesses want to grow their YouTube and Twitch channels. There isn’t the competition audience size compared to Facebook. However, their reasoning is most likely if they can drive people from their website to YouTube/Twitch, it may increase their subscribers.
As a new competition business, just start out with Facebook to announce your winners. Once you gain traction and build the business, you can begin looking at whether other platforms would be viable or not.
How Top Competition Sites Prep Before Going Live – What You Must Do First
To ensure that your winner announcements go as planned, it is essential that you carry out a few tasks before the competition is due to end. These tasks are essential to build excitement for the competition and ensure your livestream gets the necessary engagement.
Firstly, you need to ensure that your social media account has the ability to livestream.
Facebook requires:
- Your account to be at least 60 days old.
- Your Page or professional profile must have at least 100 followers.
YouTube requires:
- At least 50 subscribers.
- No live streaming restrictions within the last 90 days on your channel.
Now you know if you’re eligible you will benefit from either designing or commissioning a designer to create a “starting soon” screen for your livestreams. This is a screen that’s used at the beginning of the livestream to allow entrants time to join before the competition winner is selected.
Next, you’ll want to optimise your social media. This is a basic, but overlooked step. By “optimise” we mean ensuring that if you looked at your social media profile and your website with the names blurred out, it would be easy to tell they were owned by the same business.
You need to add your profile picture and ensure it is consistent with the logo used on your website. This is the 2nd element users look for after the page name.
Make sure that you have a bio that accurately describes your business and you can throw in some USPs too:
You’ll also want to make sure that your social media posts match your brand. If your website uses a specific colour scheme, font or brand voice, you need to copy that on social media. If customers are trying to find you on Facebook and you’re using red when your logo on the website is blue, they’re going to think your page is a potential scam.
When users are going to your website, you need to ensure its very clear and prominent where your going to be announcing the winner. You don’t want the user to have to search your website / social media to find out where you announce your prizes. This will diminish your ticket sales because users will simply find a new website that has this information present. You may think this little bit of info won’t persuade someone to leave your site, but with hundreds of other options, it’s real possibility.
So, where is best to show this?
There’s three places where we advise you promote your streaming platform.
The first, is on a “How to play” section on the homepage, or have a dedicated page, like Elite Competitions does: https://elitecompetitions.co.uk/how-it-works
As you can see, they clearly state the steps from ticket purchase, to the draw. This makes it easy for the user to trust the process and increases the chance of ticket sales.
We strongly recommend to advertise where the draw will take place on every competition page. This is the final point where customers will be taking in information before making a purchase.
Information in this space is very valuable. Nitrous Competitions, makes it very clear where to find the draw, with links to the social media.
Finally, we advise that you add where to find the draw on the entrant’s order confirmation email. If you’re using WooCommerce, there is a guide on how to edit the order confirmation email here. If your user is doing an impulse purchase, they may not have read much on your website. By providing them this key info in the order confirmation, they have an easy place to check where to find if they are a winner.
It’s often that a customer will check their emails for order confirmation details, rather than loading back up the website to check important order details. This needs to be utilised.
The final step of the pre-announcement planning is to build excitement via social media and email marketing.
Your entrants by now should know where to catch the draw, now you need to make them not regret their purchase.
This is a bit of a time-consuming but necessary step to build engagement with your audience.
We are going to break it down and give some examples of great ways to advertise your upcoming draw.
Social Media
On social media you need to be posting daily content about your competitions. We can provide some examples, but you need to go out and create content to:
- Inspire new customers to purchase upcoming competitions.
- Build excitement for upcoming draws with entrants to existing competitions.
The social media landscape has changed in the past couple of years. It used to be heavily photo-based, now it’s all about short-form videos, like TikToks and Insta/Facebook Reels.
These short-form videos are more time consuming to create and edit, but they provide significantly higher engagement.
“Instagram Reels offer ~49% higher engagement than static image posts on the same platform” – firework.com
A mixture of short-form content and static photos are the best idea. We suggest about 65-75% should be short-form videos, with the rest being static photos.
Competition Social Media Post Examples
- Create a 1min video of a walkthrough of the prize – Discuss key features and selling points.
- Create countdowns to competition closing dates (See below for an example).
- Announce the current competition odds to entice new entrants from low selling competitions.
- Showcase previous videos of winner announcements to build excitement for the upcoming draw.
- Film an FAQ video about prize collection.
Take a look at what 7 Days Performance do:
They create a sense of urgency with the countdown to the competition closing and have produced some stunning gallery images of this G-Wagon. This is something that could can easily replicate, even if you don’t have this sort of prize, or background.
If you’re still struggling with the social media marketing, check out our 2025 social media mega guide.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a bit more advanced, so don’t worry if you’re just starting out if you find this topic quite advanced.
It should be utilised on a weekly basis, rather than daily. You don’t want to bombard your customer’s inboxes.
We recommend using MailerLite. They have a great video series to get you started with Email Marketing on their YouTube channel. After previously using MailChimp, we switched to MailerLite, for an easier and more powerful platform.
Let’s jump into some examples of what emails you should be sending to your audience:
- Weekly overview of current running competitions (show all competitions running in a grid format).
- 1/2 days before a competition ends, send a reminder for those who forgot to enter.
- Low odds alerts (when a competition isn’t selling advertise the great odds).
- Send customers related competitions after a ticket purchase.
- Send cart abandon emails for customers who left items in their card – guide here.
For emails like related competitions or abandon carts, these can be sent as much as you like. But for emails that will go out to all your email subscribers, like the first 3 examples, try not to send more than weekly. Sending more often, unlike in social media marketing can damage your impact. Customers will soon get sick of seeing the same thing in their inbox and unsubscribe.
If you’re still struggling, reach out and we can assist.
Running an Announcement Livestream? Here’s How the Pros Keep It Engaging
At this point, you will have picked your platform, your users will know where to expect a livestream, you have successfully promoted it.
Now, your competition has ended and you’re ready to draw the competition.
Firstly, let’s go over how to actually draw the competition!
So, you should have a list of your ticket numbers and who owns each number. Ask your web developer if you do not have access to this.
You need to randomly roll a number and check who owns the ticket. There are multiple ways of doing this and no “right” way, as long as it is fair and transparent to your entrants.
We’ve seen people use lottery ball draw machines like this:
It’s an engaging way of doing things and our preferred method. This image shown is actually £340 (no idea why), but there are much cheaper alternatives on Amazon. If you’re using ticket numbers above 100+ you may need to buy one lottery machine per digit.
For example, if the winning ticket is 3,457. You’d draw a 3 from one machine, then a 4, then a 5 and finally a 7.
The easier, cheaper alternative is to use an online number generator. But, this does come with a few risks of users thinking it is rigged, so ensure you use a well known generator and screenshare the draw.
If you’re opting to do a draw virtually, we recommend Picker Wheel.
It allows you to draw by digit, or as a random number.
Now you have the winning ticket number, you could opt to call the winner whilst on the livestream. This is a slightly risky strategy as you have no control over what the entrant may say. Be prepared for swearing!
A genuine live reaction to a win, could provide a great watch for viewers of the stream and entice people to enter future competitions.
As the stream is ongoing, you will want to be engaging with any live stream comments. A big advantage of livestreaming vs creating a pre-recorded video is the live chat. So, make use of it!
A viewer who feels like its more of a 1-to-1 interaction with the livestreamer vs just the business talking at them will be more likely to interact with the business in the future.
Finally, at the end of the livestream, make sure you advertise your upcoming competitions. Try to give people a call to action:
“Thank you all for watching, as a reward for the next hour our Audi RS3 competition will be discounted 10%, when you enter code ‘live2025’ at checkout”
Draw Complete? Here’s What Successful Competition Businesses Do Next
There’s a couple thing you now need to do once your competition has ended. This will have to be done after every competition if you want to optimise your competition business.
Firstly, depending on your competition platform, you may need to select the ticket number that won in the website backend. This will display the winner on the competition page, so anybody that missed the draw can go onto the website and view which ticket number won.
This is important for entrants to trust future draws. If they rely on the website for competition information and you haven’t published the winner, they’re unlikely to trust that future competitions have been drawn fairly.
The winner should be added to the winners page of the website. This provides social trust for potential customers.
As you can see, we added a winners page for our latest competition client SuperSport Competitions:
By now you will have posted on social media and created some great email marketing content in the buildup to the draw. It’s also important to promote who won the competition.
Here’s examples of content you can create after the draw has occurred:
- Post the winners reaction to being successful in the competition.
- Create a short-form video of showing the winner the prize.
- Show the delivery / collection of the prize (be careful with showing someone’s home).
- If the winner picks a cash alternative, take a photo of them with a cheque for the amount.
- Post a video of the live draw number selection.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we have shown that Facebook is definitely the predominant streaming platform for the draw. It’s essential that you build excitement for the draw by creating social media and sending out email marketing to your users. Once you are doing the live stream you need to make sure its engaging! Viewers will leave if you’re just talking at the camera for 30 minutes.
Finally, you need to be supporting future draws by presenting the winner clearly on your website, social media and email marketing. This builds trust and helps to entice users who just need that nudge to purchase their first tickets.
If you’re having any trouble with anything discussed in the guide, feel free to contact us and we would be happy to go over it.
