Social Media Strategy: The Key to Crowdfunding Success

The success of a crowdfunding campaign depends largely on two major factors: how well the campaign is presented and how many people it reaches. If you want to kill two birds with one stone, then you’re going to need a solid social media strategy for Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter – anyplace your audience hangs out.

Your social media accounts can be used to create targeted advertising and branding to spread the word about your campaign. Research has shown that when you share with more people on a social media platform, your probability of success increases, too. For example, if you share to 10, 100, or 1,000 Facebook friends, the probability of success increases by 9%, 20%, and 40% respectively.

For most campaigns, crowdfunding through Facebook is the most useful social medium. However, sharing crowdfunding tweets on Twitter or photos and stories on Instagram can also be useful. Conversely, LinkedIn should be used only for professional audiences, and your strategy for this platform should be quite different from what you use on others.

Another thing to remember? Your content shouldn’t aim for a hard sell. 80% of your content should be informative without being an obvious marketing ploy. These types of posts drive engagement and sharing and help build trust with potential backers.

Why You Need Social Media For A Crowdfunding Campaign

It’s pretty simple, really. Having a good crowdfunding social media strategy will increase your chance of a successful campaign. Facebook crowdfunding will give you scope to advertise and reach a very targeted audience; crowdfunding without Facebook could see you fail to raise enough money to get your fantastic business idea off the ground. Similarly, crowdfunding tweets let you reach a wide group of like-minded folks that may be interested in your campaign; Instagram is great for visual content and is best used if your business is product-based.

Facebook has a daily active user base of 1.32 billion, making it a massive social media playground. Best of all, you can create a page for your campaign and build an entire community around it. Plus, with targeted advertising for niche audiences, you won’t be wasting time, money, and effort on sending your message out to audiences that aren’t interested in what you have to say.

If you need a little more convincing, here are a few more reasons why a strong crowdfunding social media strategy is important:

• Reach more people.
• Reach a targeted audience who will respond better to your campaign.
• You can easily engage more potential backers or investors.
• It lets you regularly update your backers with campaign news.
• You can create targeted advertising campaigns.
• Visual content is helpful for convincing people - and you can do plenty of that on social platforms.

10 Ways To Build Your Winning Strategy

Ready to get out there and start gathering backers with a few Facebook posts? Not so fast. Before you even think about creating your first post, you’ll need to understand each social media platforms' strengths and limitations. Only then will you be able to really make use of it to achieve crowdfunding success. Here are a few things to think about:

1. Pick the right platform(s): You’ll need to create social media accounts for your crowdfunding campaign, but you should pick platforms that are right for your campaign. Don’t forget to make sure that your branding is the same across your campaign and all your social accounts.
2. Get mobile-friendly: Since most social media users access their accounts on smartphones, your crowdfunding pages should be mobile-friendly and support text-to-donate functions. You could even hire influencers to spread the word about this!
3. Pick a good hashtag: This will encourage people to join the conversation and pull all posts relating to your campaign into one easy-to-find space. Don’t forget to ask supporters and donors to use it to spread the word!
4. Use a mix of content: Keep your audience engaged with a range of posts. You’ll want informative posts, stories from your supporters, campaign updates, and behind-the-scenes looks, for example. Keep in mind that only about 20% should be sales-orientated and ask people to donate to your campaign.
5. Track your results: Monitor how each post is performing so that you can get an understanding of what posts people like (or don’t like) and how they’re engaging with your content. This will help you figure out what your audience likes and allow you to create better posts and drive more engagement.
6. Cozy up to journalists: Many journalists use Twitter to find leads for stories, so getting your campaign in front of their eyes could result in some great organic stories which put your campaign in front of a much wider audience.
7. Build a community: Use social media to interact with your supporters and potential backers. Reply to comments or ask questions to drive engagement.
8. Learn to schedule: Automation is great, especially when it means you can schedule all your social media content ahead of time. Try platforms like HootSuite and Buffer for easy scheduling and analytical functions. Just remember to time your posts based on when your target audience is most active online.
9. Add a human element: People love a good story, so showing off your founder and giving a backstory to your brand brings a human element that will encourage people to get interested in your campaign.
10. Start early: Aim to launch your social channels a few months before your campaign. This will give you time to build some buzz and get people excited. Then, when your campaign’s ready to launch, people will be ready to donate straight away.

5 Great Crowdfunding Social Media Examples

Crowdfunding now has a transaction value of $8.5 billion. If you want a slice of that pie, your social media game needs to be on point. Need some inspiration? We’ve rounded up five examples of crowdfunding campaigns that have used social media to successfully raise funds.

1. Shower Strike: This campaign for clean water used the simple #ShowerStrike hashtag to engage followers.
2. Keystone-Monon Community Garden: To raise funds for a community garden, this campaign used Facebook posts to express their gratitude to followers - and kept those donations rolling in.
3. KNO Clothing: This American t-shirt manufacturer showcases its products with fun, interesting photographs on Instagram.
4. Project Aware: While crowdfunding to protect the oceans, this campaign used emotive images, timely, targeted posts, and a fun hashtag.
5. World Bicycle Relief: This crowdfunding campaign put rugged bikes in the hands of people who need them and to do it, they shared stories of their supporters engaging with the results.

Find Crowdfunding Success with a Good Social Media Strategy

Crowdfunding is a very effective and popular way of raising funds for non-profits and startups. But, the success of your campaign depends largely on how many people you reach and how well you engage with them. Social media is a great way to build a community around your brand and present your campaign to the right target audience. That’s why you should ensure you have a strong social media strategy that kicks off months before you begin your campaign.

Easyship has plenty of experience in fulfilling crowdfunding campaigns, and we’re the official shipping partner for IndieGoGo. We’re proud to have helped successful campaigns like TropicFeel, Mate.Bike, OSTRICHPILLOW, and Waverly Labs get their products to backers by offering a wide range of fulfillment options. Talk to us today to see how we can help you set up your campaign for success from the very beginning!