Crowdfunding is an incredibly interactive experience, and a successful crowdfunding campaign requires support from an engaged community. Social media marketing is an excellent tool to direct traffic to a fundraise profile. In order to maximize chances of success, follow the steps below.
Choose Your Channel
While there are many social platforms available, it’s most advisable to choose one or two platforms to begin with.
Research the users, trends, and interests associated with each platform to choose the one that’s the best fit for your startup’s marketing goals and target audience. Here are just a few to consider:
Facebook. With over 1 billion active users on Facebook, many businesses choose to utilize Facebook simply because 500 million users are active on Facebook on any given day; the extent of reach is extraordinary. Visual media (like photos) perform best on Facebook to drive engagement.
Twitter. With 500 million users, Twitter is the runner up to Facebook in terms of size and reach. Unlike Facebook users, Twitter users seek quick bits of information rather than in depth engagement. Interesting links, quotes, and clever sound bites work best on Twitter.
Linkedin. Linkedin is a professional networking platform with approximately 175 million users. Users on Linkedin crave information and articles that will better their relationships, business practices, and industry knowledge base. Additionally, targeted marketing efforts have been shown to garner more positive results on Linkedin than on other platforms.
Pinterest. Pinterest is a female-dominated (80%), visually-oriented, social platform for picture sharing. In the UK, pins center around around business and tech topics; in the US, many pins center around crafts, design, and recipes. Pinterest can be utilized by businesses to share infographics, product pictures, and other interesting visuals.
Post with a purpose
When posting on social media, be sure that your posts always have a purpose. You can do this by deciding on one to three themes that relate to your startup and are interesting to others. Make sure each post falls into line with one of your themes, and you’ll create a coherent, streamlined feel to your profiles.
Additionally, be sure not to overwhelm your audience by posting more than several times per day. Posts should always contain varied wording and content to keep your audience interested and engaged. Don’t forget to respond to interactions!
Measure effectiveness
One of the main issues that entrepreneurs have with social media marketing is the difficulty in determining its effect on pledges.
You can combat this issue by consistently using link trackers - when posting any link, simply shorten your URL using one of the many tools available (like Hootsuite) and collect weekly reports on which links provided traffic. You can then compare these analytics to pledge data to draw inferences about which social marketing methods contributed to your crowdfund’s bottom line.