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Picking Winners for Hashtag Contests

My office wanted to hold a drawing a few weeks ago, where people would share a photo with the company name as a hashtag, and one random poster would win a gift card.  These are great contests to boost a business’s social standing, but with so many hashtag friendly social networks, it’s hard to choose a winner in a fair way.

We found a great hashtag aggregator, called Hashtagr.co, that displays a pinterest-like feed of hashtagged posts across multiple social networks.  It made for a great leaderboard, and got all the data in one place, but it still didn’t solve the picking problem… So I wrote a quick script, and packaged it up as a bookmarklet.  A bookmarklet is a link that can be added to your bookmarks, that, when clicked, will run some custom javascript, rather than changing pages.

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My bookmarklet for Hashtagr selects a random post in the list, scrolls the browser window to it, highlights it with a red border on the bottom, and opens an alert box that declares that poster as the winner.  To use the bookmarklet yourself, simply drag the bookmarklet below to your bookmarks, go to a hashtag feed on hashtagr.co, and click the bookmarked link.

Hashtaggr – Pick Winner

4 Comments

    • gschoppe's profile image.

      When I used it last, Hashtagr could only search public facebook posts. Since most people have some level of default privacy policy set, their posts can’t be searched. People will have to be told to explicitly set their posts as public.

    • gschoppe's profile image.

      you might need to give me more of an explanation of your issue. hashtaggr still seems to work with twitter, tumblr, instagram, and public posts on facebook. and the bookmarklet still seems to make a random selection, as it should.

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