Crowdfund marketing: Top 10 ways to master social media promotion for your Kickstarter campaign

Crowdfund marketing: Top 10 ways to master social media promotion for your Kickstarter campaign

Crowdfund marketing for a Kickstarter campaign is heavily reliant upon your social media efforts and those of others that you can enlist or hire. For the sake of example in this article, I will assume that you are planning to launch a new Kickstarter campaign to promote your app. These techniques should work for other popular crowdfunding platforms like indiegogo just as well. The steps are laid out in the same order as your crowdfunding campaign plan should reflect as pre-launch, launch and post-launch.

BONUSES:  There are special bonuses for those of you who read all the way to the end
Hire Me – Crowdfund marketing

Top 10 ways to master social media promotion for your Kickstarter campaign June 2014

1. Spend 3-12 months during the prelaunch phase planning your Kickstarter campaign and building up your social media accounts from scratch. Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki and Salvador Briggman. Plan on 2 hours per day building up your accounts during pre-launch. While your campaign is live, you will need to spend up to 8 hours per day on social media. make room in your schedule or hire someone to help such as  myself.
2. Focus on a setting up Facebook page, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ page, and even a LinkedIn page for the product which can continue to be used after the campaign ends. Try to get the name of your product to match the name of available social media accounts first.
3. Enlist the help of influencers in your campaign’s niche. Search with a tool like Klout using keywords for your niche to find out who the influencers are. If your Kickstarter campaign is for a new social media marketing app, you might want to reach out to someone like me. If I like your pitch and are truly interested I might just just send out a Tweet or write a blog post review. Otherwise, you can hire me on Fiverr.
4. Choose a unique hashtag to use with all of your social media posts. If your app is called “Adomizer,” you could use #adomizer with all of your posts for example. Other people can use this hashtag when referring to your app and it makes it easier to search each social network for mentions.
5. Find great content to share. I recommend sharing great content related to your campaign about 80 percent of the time and promoting your own the other 20. Continue to do this throughout your campaign.
6. Use images with your posts. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn all support images in posts. Use this to your advantage so that your content stands out. Pinterest is all about images, so use great photos that you have the rights to.
7. Create an editorial calendar or your content. You can set up something as simple as a text document or even an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of all your content. I would list each piece of content with posting dates down one side and the social networks posted to across the top. Keep track of each url created as you post in your spreadsheet. This is critical to setup pre-launch, then update during the launch phase.
8. Schedule your posts using Hootsuite or Buffer. You can even resend the same post up to three times in 24 hours (once every 8 hours) just to make sure that the maximum number of followers see it.
9. Keep using your social media accounts after your campaign has ended to continue to promote your product. These accounts are now assets to your business. You can use them to help with reward fulfillment and even customer support. Most importantly, continue to communicate with your backers on a regular basis and keep the conversation going about your product.
10. Say Thank You! I cannot stress this step enough. Always be gracious. Hat tip to Rachael Alford.

BONUS 1

Use Bitly.com for shortening links in each social media post that you create. This way you can get click tracking and analytics about your content when shared on each social network. By adding a “+” to the end of any Bitly link, you can view a page with the analytics. For example: https://bitly.com/S9s8At+

BONUS 2

Recently I was interviewed by Neal Schaffer at Cisco Live! in San Francisco. Here is a podcast recording of our interview as a special bonus to you just for reading to the end. “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Crowdfund Marketing” from Maximize Your Social with Neal Schaffer.

Hire Me – Crowdfund marketing
Crowdfund marketing is a key component of any successful campaign. And social needs to be front and center throughout the process. The good news is that all of the hard work done setting up the accounts and building your following will pay off during and after your campaign ends.

How will you use these tips in your next Kickstarter campaign?

Leave a comment and do share.

Resources

Promote your Kickstarter to my 40000 plus Twitter followers 2x in under 24 hours

Promote your KICKSTARTER to my 7000 Google Plus followers in under 24 hours

9 Kickstarter Social Media Marketing Tips From Guy Kawasaki

Why do Crowdfunding Campaigns Fail?

(Image source: Canva/PeterTrapasso.com)