Crowdfunding 101 - Part 6

Yep, this post is about the effects that the top social media networks can have on your campaign. Before I go into the details of each of the main ones, I will mention that there is a little function, that I am sure you are aware of, that creates a great deal of follow through and assistance. If you take a look at the one that was evident on my campaign.
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Now, this may not give rise to a great deal of traffic or noticeable traffic (is the better way of putting it), but the reason this is good is because people are evidently sharing the project site by liking it, tweeting it and posting it. Now, I can also point out at this stage that I did increase my fan base on Facebook and Twitter and slightly on some other social media, but the conversion was negligible. So maybe the numbers may help, but the approach is a more necessary function to the capturing of the audience.

So, the social media I will talk about in this post (which maybe truncated) will be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Instagram and Google+. These sites can all help on one way or another, and is a necessary part of your strategy. I would say that one alone will help, but together they can be an effective booster. I have seen many people rely wholly on social media to get campaigns going and failed. Mainly as this is a support mechanism and not a main stay device to gather interest. Later on, in the next post, I will talk of a tool that can effectively tie all this together, which is a great way to save time and effort.
These platforms tend to come down to one thing; hashtags and ampersand (# / &).

Facebook is a major player these days. It seems funny to us now when someone says they haven't got a Facebook profile. However, there is a greater audience of young people out there that do all engage in the activity of being glued to Facebook. So, it is a key aspect to consider this platform in part of your marketing campaign. Now, what I have learnt, is the errors of my ways. After the campaign started I was going through many groups, pages and profiles blasting them with notices of the campaign and the site to go to. Now, this may work for the first part. And interested people will go and look. That is evident in the statistics. Facebook was the biggest contributor source out of all. However, maybe it could have been higher if I had considered the method of engagement.

Now, don't try to use your profile on the whole to get things moving. For a start you are at a limited audience of your followers. The best plan is to set up a page and/or group related to the campaign. In my case I had a page already set up, but it should be specific to the thing you are offering and not the campaign itself. In my case its the Pet Project. This should be done some months before you do the campaign. Why? So you can effectively set up followers to like it. Now, this is where the clever part needs to come into play.

The action of inviting all your friends (the only thing you can really do at the start) is limited by two things; first if they are interested in the page, and second, if they saw the invite. Now, I did this when I first set up the page, and after some months found that many still hadn't liked the page, even though they had mention the interest in the book, etc. So, I literally set individual messages to the people and asked why they hadn't liked the page? Many came back saying they hadn't seen the invite. And to be fair it is a hard thing to see if you don't check notifications or look on the side bar. So, this needs to be followed up.
Start to follow as many pages and groups you can find that have a similar or connected interest in the field of your campaign. How this works is that when you set forth your campaign, you can simply post in their pages and this can help. However, exhaustive posting can result in bans and deletions. So be careful. The best way to approach this is to be subtle. Some weeks or months before start doing a daily check of posts, see if there is something that can be commented on, and then make a comment on a post using the @ to denote your page. What this does is it creates a link back to your page. If it's just text in a comment:
"This Creative Pet Project is a really good place to get involved as a pet owning artist"
for example won't get people (or very few) researching the Creative Pet Project, but if it's
"This Creative Pet Project is a really good place to get involved as a pet owning artist"
with an obvious link to the place you are talking about, then a larger percentage will go to the site, simply because its easier to click a link.
Also, on your own page (which you can't get banned from or deleted posts from) make the most of putting up related content. But, be warned (a lesson I have just learnt), you need to engage the audience. Now, one of the big complaints going around about Facebook is their method of bouncing posts back to the top when comments are made. Now, I don't mind this, but thinking strategy, you can use this to your advantage. Post things that will get comments generated. This will make the post more popular as it's in their news feed at the top. And also it goes more viral. People comments means that their friends see it as well. This is viral. Now the main issue that I don't like, is that 'Likes' don't do the same. So, try to play the posts to a way that will get people commenting on, and if not a lot, you can always add a reply, which will send it back to the top.
As far as engagement goes. Recently I read an article about one fan page that increased its turnover, by simply stopping the direct sell way of using Facebook, and started using the users as a method of showing satisfaction. So, I have started applying this approach on my page, I have added a photo of a contributor to the top of the page, and made a life event, that explains a little more of the story.
This makes the person involved with the project more happy that they have been thought about. Gives them a little 'fame' as well, which people tend to cherish. I increased my fan page by 20/30 by simply doing this. If this was done at campaign time, maybe that would convert to contributions.
Now, # and & on your posts. These two elements are not obviously vital, but can be useful. # are well know from Twitter. It is known as the trending tool. So, what you can do is to seek out related trending hashtags and add those to your posts. What this will do, is make your posts more open to searches and related # hashtag seeking applications. What the & does is it allows you to tag posts with groups, people, etc. This can be done in a sneaky way, if you are interested in getting the attention of someone well known. Find their official page, and 'Like' it, then in comments use the & to add them to the post in an engaging way. Not obvious! Don't do this:
We need your support to raise money for the project @Oprah @Ellen @Rick

Do the sentence in a more interesting was, like this:
It was interesting to read @Oprah comments on animal rights, and I agree in principle, and this is one reason the +Creative Pet Project was set up.
Now, You will notice that there is a link on the Pet Project tag. This will happen on any when you use the @ symbol, and you simply select from the list.