My friend and maker extraordinaire Jen recently hit a well-deserved milestone of 1000 paying customers for her personal finance app Lunch Money (which she built all by herself!), and she decided to run a giveaway to celebrate:

https://twitter.com/lunchmoney_app/status/1366374745441099784

She asked me if she'd be able to use Browserflow to pick the winner, and I immediately thought: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. 💪🏽

Why Twitter giveaways are hard

Picking a winner for a giveaway on Twitter is surprisingly challenging for one reason: It's difficult to get the full list of users who retweeted a tweet.

If you try to scroll on the web UI or use the Twitter API, you're limited to getting the 100 most recent retweets:

Due to this limitation, popular free services that help you select a winner like Retweet Picker only consider the last 100 retweets:

Not much of a fair contest if you have more than 100 retweets! 🤔

Fairly selecting a winner

Pieter Levels ran into this problem when picking a winner for one of his giveaways. He and his friend Marc came up with a clever solution:

1. Get a list of all of his followers
2. Randomly select a follower
3. Check if they've retweeted his giveaway tweet

This removes the need to obtain a complete list of retweets, but it does add some requirements in order to work well:

• Contest entrants must follow the account and have retweeted the tweet
  • Otherwise, the followers list can't be used to select the winner
• The number of followers in the contest should be a decent percentage of the number of total followers
  • Otherwise, picking a winner may take too long due to repeatedly checking followers who have not entered the giveaway

Using Browserflow to select the winner