The crowdfunding industry has experienced rapid growth, boasting a compound annual increase of over 100% during the past three years. Start-up companies and SMEs are often drawn to crowdfunding platforms to raise funds, as they provide an achievable and relatively hassle-free way of raising capital; providing them with the freedom to promote their business and expand their network.
Concurrently, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have also experience rapid growth. These sites play an enormous role in facilitating information sharing and in recruiting supporters for crowdfunding endeavours, a symbiosis that allows crowdfunding solutions to be not only attainable, but immensely attractive for small and medium sized businesses. The social media sites chosen to promote crowdfunding will depend on the nature of the campaign, however Twitter is possibly the fastest way to spread the word and reach vast online networks.
There are now thousands of mentions of crowdfunding each day on Twitter, reflecting not only the growing buzz surrounding this form of investment, but also a broader trend towards its normalisation as a viable and dependable form of raising capital. The success of social media networks stems from our desire to connect with others and broadcast ourselves. Social media in turn has fostered the growth of the crowdfunding industry, which by definition, relies on our ability to connect with large groups of people and inspire their support.
In just 1 week, from 26 November to 2 December, Blurrt collected over 118,000 Twitter posts mentioning crowdfunding.
Tweets posted by day from 26 November – 2 December
This data provides a good snapshot of the nature of online discussion around crowdfunding and how businesses and organisations are engaging with possible investors or supporters in real-time. The 118,000 tweets mentioning crowdfunding on Twitter originate from a pool of just 35,000 unique Twitter accounts. Those discussing crowdfunding will tweet at least 4 times each on average, demonstrating how businesses and individuals are using Twitter to promote their campaigns through repeated engagement.
Of the 35,000 Twitter accounts discussing crowdfunding 64% were business accounts, 22% were males and 14% were females. This tells us that businesses are responsible for driving the majority of conversation around crowdfunding on Twitter. These gender figures are also consistent with studies that show men tend to tweet more about business and technology than women.
The sentiment expressed in tweets discussing crowdfunding was overwhelmingly positive with 82% of sentiment bearing tweets expressing positive opinion and just 18% expressing a negative opinion.
Sentiment is scored on a 10-point scale with 5 being the most positive and -5 being the most negative. The average sentiment score of tweets discussing ‘crowdfunding’ from 26 November – 2 December is 2.1.
In order to understand why sentiment was overwhelmingly positive we can look at the emotions being expressed. The principal emotion expressed was thankfulness, which makes up 72% of all emotion baring tweets. The most common words being used to express thankfulness were ‘thanks’, ‘thanks you’, ‘thx’, ‘appreciate’, ‘appreciated’ ‘#thankyou#’ and ‘thank u’.
Blurrt puts tweets into 8 different emotional categories, all of which are considered biologically primitive, from which all other emotions are derived.
Much of the conversation around crowdfunding on Twitter was driven by businesses and individuals in the sector engaging with and thanking others for showing support or investing in their campaign. In this instance Twitter becomes a platform, not only utilised for broad advertising and PR campaign purposes, but as a method of direct engagement. In many cases thankfulness was shown for support given by way of a follow, retweet, or share, or because a particular investment target was reached.
Overall discussion around crowdfunding focused on a range of key buzz words and topics. These included the terms ‘profitability’, and ‘success’, surely two of the main motivations for those seeking investment. YouTube was also mentioned often as it acts as the main video viewing platform used to share campaign videos across social media.
The themes of ‘connecting with others’ and ‘asking questions’ also appeared in a great deal of tweets, an indication perhaps of how those using crowdfunding platforms are harnessing Twitter to really build a network of supporters and encourage a two-way dialogue that goes beyond the normal investor / company dynamic.
Yet for all the one to one contact and personal outreach, big media organisations still dominate the conversation. The most influential Twitter users driving the conversation around crowdfunding during the week long window were online news sites including Mashbale, The Guardian, Frobes Tech and Fortune Magazine. News articles make up the majority of information being shared about crowdfunding on Twitter and have a huge influence on the buzz driving the crowdfunding trend.
Blurrt is a social media analytics platform which allows customers to understand social conversations, through collecting, filtering, analysing, and displaying social data in real time. This allows businesses and organisations to make sense of noisy and often inaccessible social data by showcasing interesting content and identifying hotspots in the conversation.
Blurrt have achieved several significant accomplishments to date, including providing the UK’s first live Twitter sentiment graph, which has been used to track political debates and other live events for a range of clients. They have also developed a pioneering Twitter engagement app, used by presenters to feedback live audience engagement.
Blurrt are now looking to raise significant investment of £500,000 through the crowdfunding site Seedrs. This funding will be used to recruit a dedicated sales team, invest in PR and marketing and continue the technical development of the platform. For the opportunity to become part of an award winning company visit seedrs.co.uk/blurrt.