One of the greatest advantages of crowd funding is its capacity to harness and channelize the impact of social media to gather support for a business project. While the initiation of such campaigns starts with those closest to the ones who lead the project, social media is undeniably the ideal way to reach out to the masses, other than your immediate friends and family.
Having said all that, crowd funding is not exactly a piece of cake. There is a lot of stress involved, specifically, when you’re halfway through the campaign and hit a mid-campaign plateau. So yes, crowd funding can be quite troublesome, but if you prepare for it well, and build the right connections on social media, crowd funding can be extremely fruitful and advantageous. Now let’s shed some light on the efficient ways to pull off a successful crowd funding campaign.
Crowd funding begins before the launch of the campaign
You should start considering whether or not to use Twitter or Facebook or Instagram well before the actual campaign begins. You need to have a prominent presence all across the social media channels, whether it’s on Twitter and Facebook. It is essential to access social media to get a decent shot at crowd funding, and you need to have been using them for a while.
Why is it necessary to be on social media to crowd fund successfully? Well, for starters, social media holds immense potential for your business- recognize it. You may have put together the best possible campaign, meant to back the most promising project, but if you don’t know the right ways to spread the word, you won’t raise any capital for your project.
Don’t depend on you Facebook friends alone
Facebook is an amazing medium to implement the campaign, but make sure you’re not using your personal Facebook page for crowd funding. If you only keep your crowd funding campaign restricted within your Facebook friends and family, you will be risking the future and the success of your campaign since the entire burden of the initiative will fall on your friends and family.
Of course, you can share your project on your personal Facebook page intermittently. But you should also make an active Facebook fan page for either your project or any larger framework that your project is a part of. Make your social media presence an impactful and incredible one.
Getting the crowd’s attention
No matter how intriguing your business project or book or music idea is, chances are the crowd isn’t interested in flipping through your project and isn’t even looking for it. While it’s true that all crowd funding platforms develop a hub for your campaign, but then it’s not their concern to drive traffic to your hub. That’s your responsibility.
Pick the appropriate platforms
You don’t necessarily have to be on every social media channel to promote your project. That could be pretty taxing. So instead, understand which particular social media platform will work best for your campaign and focus on that. For instance, if you are a musician, you’re possibly posting your videos and following the videos of other musicians on Vimeo or YouTube. If your project delves into fashion, Instagram has a lot of potentials to expand the scope of your campaign. If your project is related to food, you can discover people who love pictures of food on Pinterest. There is no hard and fast rule for how social media works; you just have to find what attracts your target audience.
Social media isfast; learn to keep up with it
Yes, your dream project is significant and is worth all the attention, but the key to using social media to your advantage is engaging people quickly. Tweets need to be crisp and concise with catchy punchiness that people can easily click on and re-tweet. On Facebook, you have the liberty to write longer messages, but don’t stretch it into multiple paragraphs. Also, never undermine the influence of a good picture on Facebook.
Think about going vibrant, not viral
There is no sure-shot technique to get millions of individuals to notice your crowd funding pitch video, so work on what you can control instead, i.e. giving your crowd constant (and consistently appealing) reminders to tell them that you’re striving hard for the beneficial outcome and that they are still an integral part of the team.
Provide your audience with what they need
Another major factor for the success of your campaign is deciphering what your audience needs, and then offers it to them. In many instances, a crowd can relate with a creator on a personal level.
Crowd funding is a tedious process and you need to slog it out
These crowd funding campaigns are herculean tasks to pull off, almost like running marathons, so you have to keep your pace. Stock up on some vitamins. Go for a walk. Take a refreshing shower. Eat healthy and hydrate. Take quick breaks from checking the progress of your campaign. Shut down your PC. Hand over the reins to a trusted colleague for a day while you take a technology detoxification. In this case, you employ tools like Tweet Deck or Hoot Suite to schedule tweets to be posted later. Bottom-line, allow yourself to take time out from the daily grind so that you can get back on it with a renewed passion.
After the Campaign, don’t forget to appreciate the ones who helped you.
If you’ve reached your goal of crowd funding (and even if you didn’t), show your gratitude to those who assisted you through this entire process. These people are integral to your project now, so share updates with them regularly. Keep them in the loop when your project gets reviewed. It’s also essential to let your supporters know when things don’t go as per your plan. Bottom-lineis always be honest with your supporters.
So be smart and plan for your campaign.
