This guide walks you through setting up a photo or video contest in ViralSweep, from collecting submissions to opening voting — including a critical step that many contest admins miss.
Step 1: Create your contest promotion
In your dashboard, click + New Promotion.
Select Contest.
Enter a title, set your start and end dates, and set the number of winners.
Under the Gallery settings, enable photo or video uploads so participants can submit entries.
Step 2: Configure submission approval
Before voting can go live, you need to decide how submissions are approved. This is controlled under Edit → Gallery → Content Approval.
You have two options:
Manual Approval — Each submission must be individually reviewed and approved before it appears in the gallery and becomes eligible for votes. Use this when content quality control is critical.
Automatic Approval — Submissions are published to the gallery immediately. They also appear in the Pending tab so you can review them after the fact.
Important: Voting buttons will not appear on any submission until it has been approved — either manually or automatically. If you launch voting but haven't approved any photos yet, voters will see no vote buttons. This is the most common reason voting appears broken after launch.
Step 3: Approve submissions before opening voting
If you are using Manual Approval, you must approve submissions before voting opens. To do this:
Go to your dashboard and locate your promotion.
Click Moderate.
Review entries in the Pending tab.
Click the ✓ checkmark to approve a submission, or the ✕ icon to deny it.
Approved submissions will appear in the gallery and immediately become eligible for votes.
Managing approvals at scale
For contests with hundreds or thousands of entries, manual approval before voting opens may not be practical. If you need voting to start promptly:
Switch to Automatic Approval so submissions go live immediately. You can still review and deny entries from the Pending tab after the fact.
Set your voting start time a few hours after submission opens, to give yourself a window to approve an initial batch of entries before voting begins.
Use the Deny function post-approval to remove any inappropriate submissions — denying a submission removes it from the gallery and its votes will no longer count.
Step 4: Enable and configure voting
To enable voting on your contest:
Go to Edit → Voting.
Enable voting and set your voting start and end times.
Choose your voting type: public/anonymous voting is the default. Collect Voter Info (Business plan and above) requires voters to submit their name and email before voting.
For Pay to Vote (Premium plan and above), voters purchase vote packages before casting votes. If voters are unexpectedly being asked for a credit card, the Charge for Votes setting may be enabled — contact support to disable it if this was not intentional.
Step 5: Check your voting setup is working
If vote buttons are not appearing after your voting start time:
Confirm that at least one submission has been approved (see Step 3 above).
Check that your voting start time has passed, accounting for your timezone.
Clear your browser cache or test in an incognito window — some display issues are cache-related.
Confirm your promotion is set to Active, not Draft or Paused.