KickstarterForum.org

Twitter is a great tool to drive a quick specific marketing message to your demographic you want pledges from. I have a lifestyle athletic brand and I am going to ask people who have big followings in my demographic to tweet out my kickstarter to see if that receives any response. My twitter account started late. FYI - You should set up a Twitter account at least 6 months in advance to gain followers so when you launch a project you will have a strong foundation. If you know a person(s) who has a strong following (follower #'s are subjective) and the person is in your wheelhouse of your project I would start making rapport with that individual quickly. Ah, the lessons that are being learned through this process.

@sbriggman - based on calculation, 1% of the followers will become your backers = 40 backers -> $45/backers
It is too expensive.

My thoughts: @bbd001 I think people underestimate the power of having a following. Social media (twitter in particular) is notorious for being a bad sales channel, but is an awesome rapport and marketing tool.

As we talked about in this article followers are great for helping you magnify the reach of news about your project. I feel like far more people would be willing to retweet a new article that came out about your campaign, sharing it with their followers.

Also - it's not like building up a following is a one-time thing. Ideally, your campaign should be a part of a larger creative or business goal. When you're building a tribe, you're not building it just to market and get them to buy or pledge in one specific instance. You are working to develop a real following as a brand, which only happens from consistent engagement over a sustained period of time.

I don't think you should pay for followers (via twitter ads or other means). It's far less expensive to build up your own following. Once you know your conversion numbers, paying for traffic does make sense to me, however.

Thanks everyone for the insights. We're trying to figure our next wave strategy on the KS.

Do you have any thoughts on sharing and asking influencers to share press vs. the bare campaign?

Many thanks,
Benjamin

@sbriggman and fhdefineyourhustle - I agree with you guys, excellent tips.

Well, first of all you can use a tool like Buffer to gauge the strength of your following. I'll paste an example below.




These are stats from two of the tweets that went out on @kickstartforum via buffer.

The first one got 7 clicks, 3 retweets, one favorite, and an overall potential audience of 17.3k (because of the retweets).

This is a click through conversion of about 0.04% for that one tweet (out of 17.3k).

The second got 11 clicks, 1 mention, 5 favorites, and 2 retweets for a potential audience of 9.6k audience (retweets enhanced the audience).

This is a click through conversion of about 0.11%, almost 3 times that of the previous tweet. The reason it's three times as high is because it's out of a smaller audience (9.6k).

You can use wording and time (note the time on the tweets) to trial and error test which types of messages resonate with your followers and either yield greater retweets or clicks.

I personally find that experimenting with headline writing for links that have been written about your campaign gets more engagement, but ALWAYS follow the analytics, not necessarily my or someone else's advice. Campaigns vary. The only way to really figure out what types of messages yield greater conversions is to experiment and track those experiments with analytics via Buffer or Hootsuite (I prefer buffer).

Thanks for sharing! This is could be quite helpful for my own KS campaign. cheers

Was looking at FB ads as well. Will re-assess in a week or so when I have had the chance to see if I have any positive results from a 24/7 Press release. So Far the actual article has appeared on 2 online sites but, it is early days here on the East Coast. I will update soon.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1953930

@evil - Definitely glad it's helpful. Be sure to share your own stats as well!

I did start a facebook ads campaign to link to our kickstarter but it didn't quite work as I hoped. From what I can remember our budget was $200 and in a week we had received 90 likes on the link post but only 2 click to the website with no pledges.

Maybe I should have let it run a bit longer but it seemed to me that I was wasting money on just getting likes for a post.