TWrench has changed its name to Pickaw on April 16th 2019 and became a richer and more professional platform.
twerrench? tweetrench? twittewrench? TWrench?
TWrench was a tool designed for drawing contests already published on Twitter. It had a multitude of features, from the simplest to the most advanced and has improved from year to year by conquering more and more people.
It quickly became one of the essential tools for Community Managers and was the subject of many articles in various specialized blogs:
- Twitter : faire un tirage au sort (retweet) avec TWrench
- TWrench, un outil gratuit pour faire un tirage au sort Twitter, s’améliore
- TWrench : Un outil de tirage au sort pour Twitter
- TWrench. Organiser un concours sur Twitter
At the end of its 4 years of completely free commissioning, TWrench received a total of €357.06 from 17 generous donors. This was not enough to cover the hosting costs of the service for nearly 500,000 users worldwide, nor those of the 60,000 contests with 21 million entries registered each month.
What's changing?
Almost everything. We decided to evolve because there was a need to be filled and an opportunity to be seized: provide even more services to contest organizers.
Pickaw is the new TWrench! Yes, we changed the name for another with a new story, but also much easier to say and not attached to Twitter.
And this time, no mystery! Here's what's behind the new name: Pickaw is an abbreviated version of the expression pick a winner.
One of the other major changes is status. We are moving from a simple personal website to a company with a registered trademark. This implies higher costs, as well as a team to be paid to maintain and develop the platform every day; it is therefore necessary to move to another business model that we will detail a little further on.
What's left?
But then, what are the differences?
Main principle
Many new measures have been taken to further reduce contest fraud, here are some of them that can have an impact on your use of the platform.
In order to use Pickaw, registration via a social media is now mandatory: it allows you to authenticate yourself and prove that you are the owner of the account whose entries you wish to load and make the draw for your contests. It is therefore no longer possible to load a contest from an account that you do not have access to; it was a recurring request.
Also, the draws are now unique. That is to say, only one final draw per contest is possible (except for test draws that do not count as official), where it was possible to make several on TWrench.
Existing features on TWrench
A large majority of the basic features that allow a draw to be made according to the proper rules have been retained and made available as of the Basic plan (this is the default plan assigned when you register).
While other features have become paid for, because they provide additional benefits and require a lot of development and additional analysis during the draw. Here is a small summary table:
- Importation of contests (Quick Draw)
- 3000 free entries per contest
- Anti-bots filter
- Drawing of contests
- Verification of draws
- Random shortlinks
- 10 winners / contest
- 1 account / network
- Basic features
- Anti-contestants filter
- Exclusion of accounts
- Test draws
- Custom end date
- Follow of additional accounts
- 25 winners / contest
- 2 members / team
The load of entries is available for free up to 3000 entries. For a contest with more than 3000 entries, it is billed according to the price at the time of load and according to the number of entries.
New features on Pickaw
A multitude of features have appeared and are already available on Pickaw! You will find a large majority of them exclusively in the Contest Builder, our tool for creating/planning contests:
- Automatic contest reminders
- Exclusions of previous winners
- Automatic draw
- Real-time statistics
- Contacting the winners in private
- Checking the like and comments
- Publication of the different contents
- And many more to discover...
Pickaw is no longer limited to Twitter and now sees further, we just arrived on Facebook and YouTube, and we plan to support Instagram and more social medias in the coming months! We will also offer multi-platform contests and draws among external sources (TXT, CSV...).
You will find all the currently available features on the Features page as well as those under development and to come on the Roadmap page.
About Tweetdraw (ex Twitterdraw)...
Before finishing, a word about Tweetdraw, because if you didn't know it, their services were provided by TWrench and we wanted to continue to deliver them in the future under the name Pickaw Lite.
Now integrated into their page, we have developed and maintained a module to provide them with new and future services. The various features offered by Tweetdraw have therefore been updated to be in line with our new commitments and operations.
Many thanks to Iain Haywood of The Competition Agency with whom we exchanged for months to develop this new module, and for this ongoing collaboration!
That's it!
It seems that we have mentioned all the significant changes to our knowledge. If any of the points are unclear or if you still have questions about the change, we invite you to read our Helpdesk or let us know on our social media or by email, we will be happy to answer you and complete this page 😊