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I've looked at Social Media and I've tried posting things there, following/getting followed by others in the genre (Books) and have even had a few retweets from those with 15,000+ followers. I'm just wondering if Social Media, especially Twitter, has become laden with spam. For instance, if I tab off and look at other things, I'll have 40+ tweets stacked up and I am only following 135 people. Seems like someone who was following a group with 15,000+ probably gets a ridiculous amount, too many to actually see the product. Your thoughts?

I agree. I believe many of the people that follow a large number of people are actually paid by companies to follow others. It can't be reasonable that people actually follow and READ that many tweets. I guess is this will get exposed soon and that twitter will delete many useless accounts.

Well your problem with Twitter would have to be the lack of engagement. Like any real social situation, you have to do more than just follow, you have to talk with people, favorite their tweets and join in conversations. It boils down to quality over quantity for real responses. Now having time to forever chat on Twitter with thousands of people? It's your time

TheSantaCruzDog wrote:Well your problem with Twitter would have to be the lack of engagement. Like any real social situation, you have to do more than just follow, you have to talk with people, favorite their tweets and join in conversations. It boils down to quality over quantity for real responses. Now having time to forever chat on Twitter with thousands of people? It's your time

That brings up another valuable subject though, who to follow on Twitter. I found with any success, it usually was by following news editors and writers and chatting it up with them. Those were the most beneficial relationships i've had.

So far in our prep, we've found Social Media to be handy, but not so much in terms of blasting emails to large numbers of potentially uninterested people, but in engaging our own networks.

5 Days to launch, and through genuine, personal reach out to the people in our Facebook network, we're going to have flyers about our project up on bulletin boards in a selection of schools, churches, community centers and other appropriate environments for our project. Facebook has made it easier to identify and remember which people in our networks might be most relevant (for us - which are parents, which are educators, etc.).

We'll see, but my suspicion is that it's less about the breadth of coverage we attempt (though that's vital when it comes to press, bloggers, etc.) but depth. 40 people who truly believe in the project are going to be worth more than 2,000 half-hearted clicks on a link.

So I'd say Social Media is very much alive, but we have to think of how to best use it.

But as mentioned - we haven't actually launched yet, so I'll come back in 10 days when we're 5 days into the campaign to let you know how that's actually working out for us

I've realized that really only my friends have "liked" our facebook site. I've asked them to "share" our FB page to increase reach, but to no avail. However, it has been an effective way to ensure that all of my FB friends pledge to our Kickstarter.

Some good points made. With such a huge network as social media, it can be really hard to guess just where some of those "shares" you got come from. In my case, my campaign on Indiegogo is getting page views from all over the world, which is awesome! What drew them to the site? No way to say for sure.

I think you've focused on a key point- Twitter moves FAST. That means that most people won't see a tweet unless they're looking at Twitter the moment you post. Thus, posting the same thing (maybe using different wording) at many points throughout the day is acceptable and ups the chances your audience will see it.

Day four now and we're sitting at 67 backers and around 15% funding, with a few really exciting connections getting made with local parent groups, school board, municipal government etc.

I'd say the three biggest takeaways for us so far:

1) Message everyone you know. You never know where your project is going to really connect for someone and they become an enthusiastic backer.

2) Do it personally. No one likes spam. Actually reach out to connect with the people, and if they want to talk for longer, do it - even if it cuts into your scheduled "push" times. A single excited supporter is worth a hundred extra emails being sent out.

3) Use the info social media provides you about each of your contacts, and customize your message accordingly. When I find out that someone is an avid gamer, I talk to them about the gameful design elements of what we're doing. If I know they're a parent, I connect around family relationships being the core of our project. If they're a homeschooler, I let them know about the materials we're working on developing specifically to support homeschoolers, and invite them to join that process.

Anyways - some thoughts.

A final thought: In terms of what draws folks to your site - find a way to get those metrics, as it lets you know what's working and what's not. We've got a whole schwack of bit.ly links to both our kickstarter and our website so that we can tell how people found out about it, and check our google analytics as well.

We're still crunching the numbers on our outreach so far, but look forward to getting back to the push.

Mike is right, even though tweeting just to anyone and everyone might get you so many responses or views in you conversion rate, you really need to take a lot of time to engage with people like on a normal social level , but takes time i guess