In my previous guide on how to use Thunderclap, I mentioned that we would be using this tool to garner support for our new Crowdfunding 101 Guide (Free). I’m happy to announce that we were successful. In the span of 8 days we attracted the social support of 101 awesome individuals, putting us at 101% supported and having a social reach of 238,021 people.
On June 19th at 12:00 PM EST, the message and link to the fundraising blueprint went out on our supporter’s social networks. Check out the basic stats below.
Twitter: 63.1%
Facebook: 33.3%
Tumblr: 3.6%
To gauge how effective this Thunderclap campaign was in driving traffic, I’ve decided to compare my traffic stats from Thursday June 19th to Thursday June 12th.
WordPress Stats for Thursday June 19th
WordPress Stats for Thursday June 12th.
Overall WordPress Stats for Crowdfunding 101: The Fundraising Blueprint.
Google Analytics Stats Thursday June 19 vs. Thursday June 12th.
In the stats above “sessions” typically refers to unique visitors. “% new sessions” refers to an estimate of the percentage of first time visits. “New users” reers to the number of first-time users during the selected date range. Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page without interacting with the page). Pages/Session (Average Page Depth) is the average number of pages viewed during a session. Repeated views of a single page are counted.
My Analysis
I’ve included both the WordPress and google analytics stats to give a more comprehensive overview of the traffic driven. Generally, google analytics is seen to be more accurate.
Granted, although this isn’t a 100% accurate study (would need to control for variables like type of content I was tweeting on each of these days), these numbers tell me that the Thunderclap had the biggest effect on Facebook traffic driven to my website. The fact that Facebook supporters comprised 33.3% of my campaign and drove an extra 166.67% of traffic via Facebook tells me that Facebook friends are more likely to click on a link their friends shared than an individual’s twitter followers.
Based on google analytics, it looks like 1 visitor came from tumblr from 4 supporters. I see some promise there. I’d be curious to see how much traffic a Thunderclap with a larger portion of Tumblr supporters would drive.
Overall, it had an 8.77% positive effect on the page I was trying to promote when compared to the traffic driven from the previous day the week before.
5 Tips & Techniques I used to hit my goal
1. Set a short timeframe.
I knew that if I set a long timeframe like 30 days, I wasn’t going to be as committed to the campaign and it would be this big thing hanging over my head, so I decided to make it short and sweet: 8 days. It forced me to focus on getting support early on.
2. Set a realistic goal.
When you start a Thunderclap, you can choose from one of the three options below.
I chose small, just because I knew that I could hit it in 8 days and that if I hit my goal early, I could always go over my goal. Considering that I have about 600 friends on FB and around 1,500 LinkedIn connections, I knew I could get at least 5% of that network to pledge their social support via direct messaging.
3. Create incentives
One of the incentives I used was cross promotion. I offered to tweet out particular creators if they supported my Thunderclap or to like their page on facebook, as I’ve shown below.
4. Put Your Information Out There
One of the things that helped me most was a bias towards putting my email and Facebook profile out in the open. After I exhausted my friend social network, I started messaging people who had sent me positive emails regarding my blog articles asking them to support the campaign if they found my blog to be a helpful resource during their campaign. Pretty much all of them were happy to support.
If I hadn’t put my email or personal FB out there previously, I would have no way of directly contacting these readers aside from email blasts or my social media business profiles.
5. Don’t count on the ‘Blasting’ technique too much
I wouldn’t count too much on sending out passive tweets, Facebook messages, or newsletters when promoting your Thunderclap. I found the best ROI for me to be directly contacting individuals. I did get supporters from these ‘blasting’ techniques, but I think the fact that Thunderclap is relatively new and not well known makes individuals less likely to support via these methods.
6. Put the emebed widget on your website as soon as possible.
I kind of waited to put the embeddable Thundeclap widget on CrowdCrux and my other websites until the 4th day. If I had to do it again, I would have gotten to 30% supported on the first day and then put the widget on my sites. I did see a trickle of supporters from this widget, but may have seen more if I had put it on earlier.
7. Create an Explainer Document
One of the most frequent questions I got when I asked people to pledge their social support to my Thunderclap was “What is that?” “How does it work?” “What do I do?”
I responded to each of these people individually and explained how Thunderclap works, but looking back, I would create a simple blog post entitled “How to pledge to my Thunderclap” with screenshots, and direct people to that document. If you’d like me to put together such a document for your Thunderclap, let me know in the comments below!
8. Customize Your Social Sharing.
Rather than just pasting the Thunderclap link into Facebook or twitter, I’d recommend adding call-to-action messages and taking screenshots to show the progress of your campaign. I’ve included my example below. The first image is how it traditionally looks on social media when you share the link. The second image is a custom uploaded photo along with the link to my Thunderclap.
Above, you can see how it looked when I just shared the Thunderclap link (thumbnail + headline).
With the above social media post, I uploaded the image of my Thunderclap (snapshot) to show potential supporters how close I was.
9. Emphasize the Benefits and Reasons to Support.
In every message I used, I tried to emphasize the fact that Thunderclap was free and the reason why someone should support (“If you’ve found my blog to be helpful”). If the individual knew the name of my blog, I would use the term “CrowdCrux.” If they didn’t, I’d use the term “my blog about crowdfunding.”
My sample FB message:
“Hi ____ – Thanks for adding me to your network! I am running a Thunderclap campaign for CrowdCrux and was wondering if you’d be willing to pledge your social support (Free) – Link.”
My sample email message:
“Hi _____ – How are things going? I’m running a Thunderclap and am at __% with __ hours to go. It’s free to support (just need to pledge your twitter or fb support). Would appreciate it if you could support us! 🙂 :)”
10. Optimize For Conversions
This is something I did not do well or give much thought just because I wanted to test out the Thunderclap tool as soon as possible. Looking back, I would spend more time on optimizing the message I sent out to include hashtags, mentions, and a strong call to action.
Supporters of your Thunderclap will have the chance to include their own custom message like: “Support my friend Sal and his new crowdfunding guide!” or the message I chose “Increase your chances of crowdfunding success :). Learn how to thrive on Kickstarter or Indiegogo for free!”
The vast majority of my supporters just went with the message I chose. I may have received better conversions (clicks/traffic) if I had put more thought into the best way to craft this message.
Conclusion
I hope my stats and advice will be helpful for your Thunderclap. Keep in mind that my findings are constrained in that I only compared two days and if I had compared multiple days, it might show that the Thunderclap campaign had more of an effect, as people check their social media accounts over the span of multiple days and there is sometimes a lag.
I’d love to hear what you are “Thunderclapping” via comment below and your experiences with the platform.
