As crowdfunding grows in popularity, so too do the number of service providers, consultants, and marketing gurus that may make offers to tweet out your Kickstarter campaign to thousands of their followers, or get you some awesome social media promotion through Fiverr, a website where you can buy services for $5.
Before you take them up on their offer, be sure to invest a good three hours doing diligence on the company or individual. Can they really deliver the value to your campaign that they are offering? I’ve put together a small guide to help with this research. This five part series will include some useful tips and resources as to how to go about doing due diligence on crowdfunding service providers and consultants.
1. Verify the Authenticity of Their Twitter Following
You can use StatusPeople to verify the authenticity of any twitter account’s followers. Sometimes, companies or service providers will buy followers ($5 – 1,000 followers is common) in order to appear like they have a larger following than they do.
For one, this communicates social proof of their services. Their following also serves as a potential product to sell (advertising your campaign). In addition, it highlights them as someone in the community that is active, well-respected, and someone to follow.
Unfortunately, this “fake follower” information is rarely disclosed to potential customers and therefore is disingenuous. It’s true that the company or service provider may not mean to be deceive. After all, it is very difficult to amass a large number of followers and takes years of hard work (or a spike from a legitimate source). Either way, as a buyer, I would want to know if a company inflated their social media clout with fake followers and StatusPeople is one tool to assess this.
I tried it out with CrowdCrux’s 2,700 some followers (I have never bought followers) and it yielded the results below. As you can see, even if a company or individual does not buy fake followers, they likely will have some fake accounts following their twitter username. I also tried it out with an account in the community that I know bought fake followers and it yielded about 90% fake – so I know the tool works (I won’t mention the company).
Keep in mind that the fact that a company or individual purchases fake followers does not mean that they cannot add value to your crowdfunding campaign. However, I do believe it says something about the integrity of that individual or firm and probably is an indication that you, as a consumer, should be extra careful with your due diligence. You might also want to use this bit of information as leverage to negotiate better prices.
Do you have experience with a crowdfunding service provider or would you like to share your story? Leave a comment below!
