Social media is now one of the most important tools for boosting businesses. It has provided companies with a fantastic communication medium by which they can implement their business plans. Crowdfunding strategy is one of the newest techniques companies have tried to implement with the help of social media. In this article, you will know about How to take advantage of social media to support your crowdfunding strategy.

Raising capital has always been a critical stage in the growth process of many businesses. In crowdfunding, you have to gather lots of small contributions from individuals to finance your business or project. With an impressive audience reach, social networking is the best method by which you can support your crowdfunding campaign.

Being as an entrepreneur, you should also be aware of what’s going around the social media, what are the latest trends, dos & don’ts and many more as this will help to ensure the success of your campaigns.

TADA, one of the best Shopify pop-up apps, has recently released a list of latest social media trends that you will have to master in 2020. Have a look, it’s full of crucial information that you can’t miss!

So, if you want to use social networks to help you in raising capital through crowdfunding, you had better read the below paragraphs.

Define clear goals

The first step before embarking on any new career is to set clear goals. Without clear goals, you cannot devise an efficient plan and select useful tools to reach acceptable results. Your goals must be clear and specific so that you can measure them and track the results based on them.

For example, you can define a certain number of followers, posts, comments, likes, and shares you expect to reach within a specific period. By this approach, your activities will be focused on these certain results.

Crowdfunding is not an exception, and you need to set sensible goals and try to reach them.

Target your audience

Depending on the type of product/service, certain parts of society are more likely to be your potential customers or investors. It is of paramount importance to put your focus and efforts on these groups. Because you do not have enough time and resources to make all people buy your products/services or invest in your company.

Targeting niche relevant audience can affect every decision you make in the next steps and save your time and money. In crowdfunding, you need to gain as many followers as you can and ask them to invest in your business or project. It is obvious that niche relevant audiences are more willing to spend their money on their desired industry field.

So, you have to try every channel/group/blog/forum/etc. on which you can target them. You have to join every community in which people might be eager to collaborate with you.

Choose suitable social media platforms

Also, you have to choose social media platforms for the campaign. When you start a crowdfunding campaign, you have to focus on the social networks that will provide the most impact. You need to know on which networking services you have the most followers and which accounts have the greatest influence on your niche on that platform. Even, it is important to select the platforms you are most comfortable with.

Among more than 50 globally famous social networking apps/sites, top social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, etc. are highly recommended. They have the most distributed networks of users. You need to know the difference between these platforms to perform well. For example, Instagram is a visual-based platform as opposed to LinkedIn which is an employment-based network.

Generate compelling content

In marketing, you need to create and distribute compelling, relevant content consistently in order to gain a number of followers (clearly defined as a goal). Your content ultimately should generate leads and convert them to sales.

In crowdfunding, you need to generate relevant content in order to gain the attention of people so that they consent to invest in your project. Generally, the fundamentals of content generation will not change in this new approach. You just have to broadcast your message and prove the profitability of your project to your followers.

One of the most important factors in content generating is visualization. You must have noticed that the majority of people usually tend to see posts including images/videos rather than texts. So, it is highly recommended to generate as many high-quality images/videos as possible describing your project from different points of view. You can ask your followers and other supporters to generate content for you to save time and money.

Of course, visual content cannot be solely successful. For example, you need to create creative hashtags for your crowdfunding campaign. You have to use it in all of your social media posts. Without smart hashtags, you cannot bring your posts under one unique topic and make your visual content visible in search results.

Last but not least, you need to focus on informative posts rather than monetized posts. In other words, most of your social posts should educate and inform people of the usefulness and beneficial aspects of your project. These kinds of contents can lead to more shares and also a higher engagement rate. You can also include a limited number of money-related posts and directly mention your need for donations.

Do not forget the engagement

There is not any chance for your campaign to be successful on social media if you do not engage with your audience. It’s important to encourage people to join your cause by using a push/pull attraction techniques when posting on social media platforms.

Set certain times of week and day to write engaging posts supporting your contents so that lure your followers to respond. Also, you can entice them by alarming deadlines so that they think they might lose a great opportunity.

That would be very much appreciated to keep your followers informed of any updates and timely statistics. For instance, let your followers/supporters know your campaign has reached a certain funding milestone or has been mentioned in mainstream channels/groups.

More importantly, bear in mind that appreciating any kind of support including donations, or even comments, shares, mentions, and likes. Your contributors, in particular, need to know that you respect their reactions and consider them to be part of the project.

Reacting to your community’s supports is the best way to engage with them and build a strong brand identity. You can even engage at a personal level to strengthen your connection with your community and gain their trust.

Analyze your performance

Every campaign needs to be measured and analyzed so that its weaknesses and strengths be clear. Of course, crowdfunding is not an exception. 

Based on Social Tradia, even influencers need to analyze their performance to keep their followers. Social media platforms can significantly facilitate the process of performance assessment by some useful analytics tools.

Every social network has its own analytics tools that can provide you with informative statistics about your activities on social media. For example, Facebook and Instagram offer Insights for measuring the performance of your activities. Also, Google Analytics is a very useful tool for Google letting you measure your advertising ROI as well as track your Flash, video, and social media sites/applications.

Based on your analytics report, you can optimize your activities and expect a better result in future campaigns. You need to focus on increasing engagement, which can only be achieved if you consider the reports regularly and adapt your strategies according to patterns and trends.

Conclusion

We tried to explain how to manage social media to hold a crowdfunding campaign even without a trained team. Social media is now a crucial part of every business activity, and crowdfunding campaigns are not exceptions either for individuals or brands. We recommend you to focus on creating compelling content to reach as many audiences as you can. The more audiences and the higher engagement rate you can reach, the more donations you will receive.