Facebook Giveaway Comments — Download Every Entry to CSV & Excel (Free, 2026)

If you run a giveaway on a Facebook Page, you know the problem: the post says "1.2K comments", but scrolling shows a few hundred, sorted by "Most relevant", with replies folded away and a "View more comments" button that never reaches the bottom. To pick a winner fairly you need a list — every comment, every reply, who wrote it and when. This guide shows how to download Facebook giveaway comments to CSV or Excel for free, which link shapes work, what counts as an entry, and how to get from a raw export to a defensible draw.

The problem with "Most relevant": why you never see all the entries

Facebook does not show a comment thread in order. On Pages the default sort is Most relevant, which pushes comments from friends, verified profiles and people with lots of reactions to the top and buries the rest. Switching to All comments helps, but even then the thread loads in chunks, replies stay collapsed under "View N replies", and comments Facebook's filters consider low quality or spammy are hidden outright. Comments from people whose privacy settings restrict their activity are invisible to a Page admin, yet still show up in the count.

A host who scrolls, picks a comment and posts "Congratulations!" has drawn from a subset Facebook chose — neither random nor complete. Contests make it worse:

• Tag-a-friend posts create replies. Tagged friends reply to the entry, the entrant replies back, and the thread under a single comment can hold a dozen messages that are not entries.
• Late entries are hard to spot. Facebook shows "3d" or "2w", not a timestamp, so anything near the deadline is a judgement call.
• The count moves. Deleted comments, comments hidden by the Page's profanity filter and comments from blocked users all drift in and out of the badge number.

Exporting fixes all three: one row per comment, a full created_at timestamp, and a reply_to_id column that separates entries from replies.

Which Facebook links work and how to grab the right one

Facebook hands out several link formats for the same post, and hosts often hit a wall by pasting a Page URL or a notification link instead. Paste the post link into the Facebook comment exporter; the following shapes work as copied:

Three link mistakes that return zero comments

1. The Page URL instead of the post. facebook.com/yourpage is a feed, not a post. Click the post's timestamp to open its permalink.
2. A notification link. Links copied from a notification contain comment_id= and open a single comment. Strip everything after the ? or use Copy link on the post itself.
3. A private post. Posts set to Friends, or inside a private group, are not readable by anyone outside. Page posts are public by default, so this mostly affects personal-profile giveaways.

Downloading every comment from a Facebook contest post

The whole process takes about a minute for a post of a few hundred comments.

1. Open the contest post and copy its link using one of the methods above.
2. Go to zocialcomment.com/export/facebook, paste the link and start the export. The first 100 comments of any post are free, no signup.
3. Watch the preview fill. Replies are included for Facebook, so the row count usually lands above the badge on the post.
4. Choose a format: CSV for Google Sheets, Excel (.xlsx) if you want to open the file directly with typed columns, or JSON for a script.

Every row carries the same core columns as any other platform on the site — author, username, avatar_url, text, likes, replies, created_at, language, is_pinned, id, reply_to_id — followed by Facebook-specific columns: reaction_count, the individual reactions_love, reactions_haha, reactions_wow, reactions_sad, reactions_anger and reactions_care counts, author_id and author_gender where Facebook exposes it. Column names and the free cap are the live product values; they are the same in the file you download today.

Contest posts that outgrow the free cap are a one-time payment for that export — never a subscription (see pricing).

A Page giveaway that ran on three networks

Many hosts run the same campaign on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Export each from its own page — Instagram, TikTok, Facebook — add a platform column, stack the sheets and draw once. The Instagram and TikTok giveaway entries guides cover those two.

Top-level comments, replies and reactions: what counts as an entry

Your rules decide this, but the export gives you the data to apply them consistently.

Top-level comments

A row with an empty reply_to_id is a direct comment on the post. For "comment to enter", "comment with your answer" and "tag a friend" formats, these are the entries.

Replies

A row whose reply_to_id is filled is a reply to another comment. In tag-a-friend giveaways most replies are the tagged friends saying "omg yes" or the host answering questions — not entries. The exception is a "reply to this comment" mechanic, where the entries are exactly the rows whose reply_to_id equals the id of your anchor comment. Filter by that value and you have the list.

Reactions

Reactions on the post are not comments, so they are not in the export. If your rule was "like and comment", verify the like for the drawn winner only. Reactions on comments are in the file (likes and the reactions_* columns), which is what photo-vote contests need.

Specific formats

• "Comment with your answer" — filter text for the correct answer. Expect variants: "A", "a)", "A1", "Answer: A". Use a contains-filter, then eyeball the edge cases.
• "Tag a friend" — tagged names appear as plain names in text. Facebook's own terms do not permit tagging friends as a required entry condition on Pages (see the last section), so treat tags as optional and never disqualify an entry for not tagging.
• "Comment a keyword" — filter text for the word. Keep the filter case-insensitive; "GIVEAWAY", "Giveaway" and "giveaway ✨" are the same entry.

Cleaning the export in Excel or Google Sheets

Open the CSV or .xlsx and work through these steps. Each is one filter or one formula.

1. Remove replies. Filter reply_to_id to blanks only (unless your mechanic is reply-based).
2. Enforce the deadline. Sort by created_at and delete rows after the close time. The timestamp is exact, so "5:59 pm" versus "6:01 pm" stops being an argument.
3. Remove yourself and staff. Filter out the Page's own replies and any employee accounts.
4. Apply the mechanic. Filter text for the keyword, answer or tag count as described above.
5. One ticket per person. Add a column with =COUNTIF($M$2:$M$2000, M2) where column M is author_id, then keep the first row for each person or, if the rules allowed multiple entries, leave them. Microsoft documents the function on the COUNTIF reference page. Do not deduplicate by author — two different people can both be "Sarah Lee".
6. Number the survivors. Put 1, 2, 3… in a new column. This is your ticket list.

A closer walkthrough of the spreadsheet stage, with the formulas laid out for Instagram exports that behave the same way, is in verifying giveaway entries in a spreadsheet.

From clean list to winner

With a numbered list of N valid entries, the draw is one random integer between 1 and N.

• In Sheets or Excel: =RANDBETWEEN(1, N). Copy the result as a value immediately, because the cell recalculates on every edit.
• Or use random.org's integer generator with min 1 and max N, and screenshot the result.

Look up the winning number, open the profile via author_id, and confirm any secondary conditions (follows the Page, liked the post) for that one person. Draw a backup or two with fresh numbers. If you prefer a click to a formula, the comment picker guide runs the same draw on the export.

Keep the raw export, the cleaned sheet and the random number with its source. If an entrant asks how the winner was chosen, you can show every step.

Notes from the exports Facebook contest hosts run

We run the exporter, so we see the shape of these jobs. A few things stand out in Facebook giveaway exports.

The links are almost never permalinks. Most Facebook contest exports arrive as facebook.com/photo?fbid=… from a desktop browser or facebook.com/share/p/… from the mobile app. Both work as-is, which is why we do not ask people to find the "real" URL first.

The badge undercounts. Rows exported are routinely higher than the count shown on the post, because replies and filtered comments are folded out of the visible number. Expect the export to be the larger figure.

Entries are short and repetitive. Photo-vote contests where thousands of comments are "Foto 27"; answer contests where a thousand rows say "A1"; keyword contests where the entry is the single word "Routine" or "Book"; tag-a-friend posts where an entry is two or three names and an emoji, or "Done all steps ✅" plus the names. That shape makes the spreadsheet stage fast — one contains-filter does most of the work.

Exports happen the night the contest closes. Hosts usually export within an hour of the deadline, often several posts within ten minutes, frequently the same giveaway on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok back to back. Export right after close, before deleted comments and late entries blur the list.

Replies behave differently by platform. Facebook exports include replies by default. On TikTok, replies are off by default and switched on in the preview, so if you are merging platforms, check that both sheets have the same reply handling before you stack them.

Facebook's promotion terms in plain words

Facebook's rules for contests live in the Pages, Groups and Events Policies. Read the current text before you post; the short version as it applies to a comment giveaway:

• You are responsible for the lawful operation of the promotion — official rules, eligibility (age, location), and compliance with any registration or approval required in the countries you accept entries from.
• You must include a complete release of Facebook by each participant, and state that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed, administered by, or associated with Facebook. A sentence in the post caption or linked rules covers this.
• Personal timelines and friend connections may not be used to administer promotions. "Share on your timeline to enter", "share on a friend's timeline to get extra entries" and "tag your friends to enter" are not permitted entry conditions. Liking, commenting and reacting to a Page post are fine, which is why comment-to-enter is the standard format.
• Facebook does not help you administer the contest. Notifying winners through Facebook is at your own risk and there is no built-in draw — hence the export.

Two adjacent rules matter as much as the platform's. If the giveaway involves a brand paying you or gifting the prize, the FTC Endorsement Guides expect a clear disclosure of that relationship in the post. In the UK, the CAP Code's prize-promotion rules require that winners are chosen under an independent or verifiably random process and that the prizes are awarded as described — a saved export plus a random number satisfies the "verifiably random" part in a way a scroll-and-pick never can.

None of this makes exporting comments a grey area — you are reading public comments on your own post to run the promotion you promised. It does raise the bar for the draw: if your terms say "winner chosen at random", the full list and the number are how you prove it.

Download Facebook giveaway comments free →

Related reading: Facebook comment download — free CSV, Excel & JSON, Instagram giveaway picker apps or export the comments?, Exporting Facebook group comments.