How to Pick Multiple Winners for an Instagram Giveaway
When a giveaway has several prizes, running the draw once per winner wastes time and makes it harder to prove the whole thing was fair. Picking all your winners in a single draw, from the same eligible entry pool, keeps the odds identical for every entrant and gives you one clean record instead of several. Here's how to set it up.
Quick Answer
Set the Number of Winners field on InstaPicker's comment picker to however many prizes you're giving away, then run the draw once. The tool pulls that many unique winners from the same eligible comment pool in a single pass, so every entrant has one shot across all the prizes rather than separate odds per draw.
One Draw or Several? Fairness Explained
Running three separate draws for three prizes sounds simple, but it introduces a problem: should someone who already won prize one be eligible for prize two? If you re-run the full entry pool each time, the same lucky person could sweep every prize, which looks (and often is) unfair to everyone else who entered. If you manually remove each winner before the next draw, you're doing extra bookkeeping and opening room for mistakes.
A single draw that selects multiple unique winners from one eligible pool solves both problems at once. Nobody can be drawn twice, every entrant has the same odds across however many prizes you're awarding, and you have one screenshot or recording that covers the entire result instead of three.
Setting the Number of Winners in the Picker
- Paste your post or Reel link into the Instagram Post URL field.
- Set your entry filters as usual — one entry per person, required mention, excluded words, whatever matches your caption's rules.
- In the Number of Winners field, enter how many winners you need (for example, 3, if you're giving away three identical or different prizes).
- Press Scrape Comments & Pick Winners. The tool loads the eligible comments and draws that many unique winners in one pass.
- Export the winners list, which now contains every winner in the order they were drawn.
That order matters for the next part.
Ranked Backup Winners and When to Use Them
Draw a few extra names at the same time as your main winners, and treat them as ranked alternates: first alternate, second alternate, and so on. The simplest way to get this is to set Number of Winners slightly higher than you actually need — for example, request 5 winners for 3 prizes, treat the first 3 as the main winners and the last 2 as ranked backups.
This matters because non-responsive winners are common enough that you should plan for them before you draw, not scramble afterward. If your stated claim window passes (most giveaways use 24 to 72 hours) and a winner hasn't replied, you move to the next-ranked alternate and announce the change publicly, rather than running an entirely new draw that reopens questions about fairness. The full process for verifying a winner and handling a non-response is in our guide to verifying a giveaway winner before you send the prize.
Different Prizes for Different Winners
If your prizes aren't identical — say, a $100 prize, a $50 prize, and a $25 prize — decide upfront whether the draw order determines which prize each person gets, or whether winners choose or you assign prizes after the fact. The cleanest approach, and the one your entrants will find easiest to trust, is to state in your rules that "the first name drawn wins Prize 1, the second name drawn wins Prize 2," and so on, since the exported winners list already preserves draw order. For prize ideas across different budget tiers that work well as a multi-prize giveaway, see our collection of Instagram giveaway prize ideas.
Announcing Several Winners
Announce all the winners together in a single post, not scattered across separate Stories. Include:
- Each winner's @handle, tied to which prize they won if prizes differ
- The total number of eligible entries the draw ran on
- Which account will be contacting each winner
- The claim deadline, stated once for everyone
Template:
🎉 Giveaway winners! Drawn from 1,842 eligible entries: 🥇 @winner_one — [Prize 1] 🥈 @winner_two — [Prize 2] 🥉 @winner_three — [Prize 3]
We'll be messaging each of you from this account. Please reply within 72 hours to claim your prize. Thanks to everyone who entered!
Posting it as a feed post or Reel means it stays visible for anyone who entered and wants to check the result later, not just the people who happened to see a Story in time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not if you draw all winners in a single pass with InstaPicker's Number of Winners set to more than one — the tool selects unique entries, so the same commenter can't be drawn as two separate winners within that one draw.
That depends entirely on how many prizes you have to give away, not a fixed rule. What matters more than the count is drawing them all in one pass from the same eligible pool, so the odds stay identical for every entrant regardless of how many prizes are on offer.
Request a few more winners than you actually need in the same draw — for example, 5 winners for 3 prizes — and treat the extra names as ranked alternates in the order they were drawn. If a main winner doesn't respond within your stated claim window, move to the next-ranked alternate and announce the swap.
No, and it's better if they aren't. Drawing them in the same pass as your main winners, just further down the list, means every alternate came from the identical eligible pool and draw event, which is easier to defend if anyone questions the fairness of the result.
It's good practice to mention it in your official rules (something like "if a winner does not respond within 72 hours, an alternate winner will be selected"), even if you don't publicly name the alternates until they're actually needed.