Social media marketing is a cornerstone of successful crowdfunding and Twitter – as the world’s second largest social network – has become the top choice in spreading the word and reaching backers and investors.
While Facebook’s dwindling organic reach now forces users pay up in order to actually reach those who’ve liked their page, Twitter is still a place where you can communicate with your followers in real time and without burning through your marketing budget.
So far so good. But if you’re like most entrepreneurs, you‘ve probably spent more time developing your business idea than building a Twitter audience (and rightfully so!). However, with over 316 million active users on Twitter, it’s a source of eyeballs and support you cannot ignore. In this blog post, I will share some simple, yet powerful tips to get started in the right direction.
Let me say one thing first: If you’re reading this and your campaign is already live, it’s likely too late to do anything that will significantly move the needle. Twitter is similar to other social networks in that it takes time to build a network you can tap into when you need it. Unfortunately, the sense of anonymity of communication from behind a computer keyboard makes many forget that those Twitter handles on the receiving end of their messages are also real people who you need to build rapport with before they are interested in anything you have to say.
The process takes time: Usually 3-6 months, depending on how established your Twitter account is and what your individual campaign goals are. The good news is that once you have your Twitter strategy implemented, it will be a reliable source of engagement, traffic and, last but not least, financial backing of your crowdfunding campaign.
Upload Profile Image and Header Background
Twitter’s default profile image is an egg. Go figure… If you don’t change this, it sends a clear signal that says: “I really don’t care much about my Twitter profile, so do not follow me.” Since you are going to use Twitter for business, use your LinkedIn profile image or a professional headshot. If the account is under your business name, you can also go with your company logo as the profile image. The profile image is visible not only on your profile page but also next to every tweet or re-tweet, so make sure it’s a good one.
The header background is the image users will see when visiting your profile page. Pictures say more than a thousand words, so use this prime real estate wisely. Upload a high quality image that tells the user as much as possible about who you are and what you do. You can use a rendering or drawing of whatever it is you want to crowdfund or a cool shot from your last gig, if you’re a band, but most importantly, pick one that makes a positive first impression.
Add Bio & Link
You can add a 160 character bio to your Twitter profile page. I recommend you sum up what your campaign is about and include the most important keywords that your target audience is interested in as #hashtags. This will help the discoverability in Twitter searches and boost overall engagement. In the URL field, you can either enter your website address or a link to your crowdfunding campaign page. Either way, it’s a great way to get traffic so make use of it.
Buy Followers
I am well aware that buying followers doesn’t result in direct engagement, and some online marketers even frown upon it. However, there are two very good reasons to buy a couple of thousand followers if you’re just getting started on Twitter.
The first reason has to do with the empty restaurant phenomenon and is all about social validation: Imagine you’re strolling the streets of a city you’ve never been to before, looking for a nice place to have dinner at. Would you rather pick a restaurant that’s completely empty or will you chose the one across the street that is packed with patrons?
You see, consciously or not, humans go by social validation and if your Twitter account is only followed by a handful of users, it simply isn’t very appealing to strangers to follow you. It makes your account look unpopular, regardless of how awesome your campaign may be.
It takes the most time and effort to get to your first 500 Twitter followers. So why not just skip this painstaking process? Sure, adding 2000 followers from Fiverr.com for 5 bucks won’t get your campaign funded, but it will instantly make your account look more popular and it sends a subliminal message to potential new followers that says,
“This account is followed by thousands of people so I should probably follow it too.”
It will drastically increase the number of people who will want to follow and engage with you on Twitter.
The second reason is a more technical one and has to do with Twitter’s follow restrictions. Without getting too technical, if your account follows more people than follow you back, Twitter will start blocking you from following more users and worse problems might arise as well. It is a good idea to give your follow ratio a head start in order to stay out of trouble with Twitter and to speed up the process of building your audience.
Use Marketing Software
Building an audience on Twitter, if done manually, takes a very long time and is utterly inefficient. By manually, I mean literally going to Twitter.com, searching and following users you think will follow you back. There are so many things to consider when following people, because after all, what you want is for as many of them to follow you back so it is not you just following them. The problem is that you will want to only follow high-quality authors of tweets in your language and target industry. Twitter doesn’t provide sophisticated search filters to get to the users you really want and it also doesn’t offer a way to easily unfollow users who do not follow you back.
As mentioned above, Twitter has complex limits for to how many people you can follow and the main determining factor is how many people follow you back. In order to grow your Twitter account to thousand or tens of thousands of followers, you must keep this ratio under control, which can be a challenge.
A fully managed web app solution to grow your crowdfunding audience on Twitter is Crowd Builder, a Krowdster.co service that lets you grow and engage a highly targeted Twitter audience with minimal effort. Using a service like this will free up your valuable time to focus on more important aspects of your crowdfunding campaign.
Follow the recommendations above and you will be able to build a strong pool of followers on Twitter who will help you share, fund and realize your crowdfunding dreams. It’s up to you to make it happen.