Crowdfunding 101 - Part 9

This is the last post before the summary of my conclusions, recommendation and tip analysis. I have not been able to include all the little pieces that are necessary and evident in my plan, or a good plan, but there has been enough here to make you aware that it's important to consider many aspects of the strategy of a crowd funding campaign other than the page itself and Facebook.

Previous stated in an earlier post, when I did the first campaign there was a reaction in contributions at three points. One was to do with the article I was featured in, and the other two, which resulted in the most contributions came from, what is called, a ThunderClap. Now, this is a mass blast that goes out to all the linked accounts of the ThunderClap. What it does is it spreads a universal shortened statement (like a Tweet) over Twitter and Facebook. So, it measures the viral affect of any registered person. And when the date of the blast is met, it posts on everyone's wall. The idea being that out of the 120,000 reach (for example) there will be an amount that will convert to following the link and then so contribute.

It works greater in theory than in practice, but even the practical use is very effective. They have restricted the free version some since I first started using it, and it is very important to know that if you have your campaign set up and know the link to do this two weeks before the campaign starts. As it takes two weeks to build the 100 people needed to get the blast to work. That is the negative side, and is hard work sometimes to get the necessary people to register it. But as I said, if I didn't do it, chase people, etc, I wouldn't have gotten the biggest contributions of the campaign.

This next tip is not a tool, but a tip based on some experience. When you register on a website or web service, many a time you rush the process and want to get started, without looking at the finer details of some of the setting. Many nowadays allow you to connect multiple social media sites. What this can do for you is one major thing. Help on your SEO level on Google, but also helps the integration process, that means that sometimes when you post in one place, it appears on another. An example being Twitter. I tweet, or share a YouTube video for example, via Twitter and it appears on my Facebook threads. That means time saved.

Now, the next four will be put in a group, as they tend not to directly help you, but can help in the tedious aspects of knowing what to add and how to compose the pieces. As I mentioned before, the hashtag is a common factor now, but instead of just making random ones up, wouldn't it be nice to know what is the best trending ones? There is a tool that helps with that, and it's basic form is free.
That tool is TagBoard! The way it works is that it allows you (the free version) make a board that will list items sitting under a specific hashtag. How this helps is a) you can see what is trending in related hashtags and also you can customise hashtags to suit the audience you are seeking. Another one that you can use without registering (at the moment) is HashTagify! How this works is to show a know hashtag or a search related hashtag and see the popularity of other hashtags around that theme.

You may want to apply the #painting tag and only that, but with a little research you can see that art is a bigger contender, so applying that also, will dramatically change the aspect of any post.

The next two are related to the process of seeking out where your social viral influence is taking place. The first one is Topsy! What this does is to search Twitter feeds for related strings, and the overall timescale, approach and so forth. Now this can help to show you how well your social media campaign is actually working, but also, by doing other searches, enable you to guide and manipulate your campaigns to be more affective in other areas.

Finally, SocialMention is a nice tool that extends on the previous, by allowing you to see more scope in the overall picture. It is of great help to know that your hard work is being recognised. It is advised to use the advanced search for phrases or multiple word searches, else you will get a string of results about all sort of stuff.

So, these are some of the better tools used or recently found, that will be applied to the next campaign to help bring some better results in the whole process making the campaign actually happen. Tomorrow there will be a final summary of the things I can recommend and encourage and the sort of things not to do to make the campaign work better for you.

First posted on my blog on 9th April 2014

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