Since the dawn of Kickstarter and Indiegogo, Twitter has been one of the most important tools to find and engage with crowdfunding backers, not just for Kickstarter and Indiegogo campaigns, but for all types of crowdfunding campaigns ranging from non-profits to equity crowd investing.
After a dip, the popular social media platform has made some big changes, like increasing the character limit from 140 to 280 and has seen a real revival in recent months.
With over 330 million monthly active users, it is a source of backers that should not be ignored, albeit Facebook’s sheer dominance.
In fact, it is often easier and cheaper than on most other platforms, Facebook included, to find and engage with backers of previous campaigns, in particular, if you’re using the right software tools.
There are different ways to achieve the goal of connecting with crowdfunding backers, ranging from free, (but labor intensive) to automated Twitter marketing to paid ads.
In this blog post, we’ll look at paid Twitter Ads using custom audiences of Kickstarter and Indiegogo backers and super backers, using exported data from Backer Directory.
So… what’s the secret to successful Twitter ads?
The problem with Twitter Ads is (and has been) audience targeting.
Its ad platform makes it much more difficult than Facebook to create highly targeted audiences for your campaign.
However, like Facebook, Twitter also allows advertisers to upload a custom audience file and target that audience using Twitter handles.
You’ll be surprised how well Twitter Ads work if the right targeting is in place. Targeting is more important than anything else when it comes to paid ads.
Traffic (read: Backer’s clicking through to your campaign) is typically cheaper and more productive than traffic from Facebook.
If you have a marketing budget for Facebook but not Twitter, I suggest allocating 10% it to Twitter and A/B test the results with Facebook.
You’ll never know what you may be missing out on unless you run a comparison test.
If you are serious about your crowdfunding campaign and want to increase your odds of succeeding, you need to adopt a “try anything it takes” attitude.
Step 1
Sign into Backer Directory. If you do not have an account yet, you can get a free preview account. However, to export backer data, you will need to upgrade to a paid account.
Step 2
Set your desired search filters to query the database and then click Export to download the results for upload to Twitter. You should narrow down your search as much as possible while keeping in mind that the ideal number of backers to export is between 10,000 and 15,000. If you export smaller lists, merge them before uploading them to Twitter to make sure there are enough records with Twitter handles so that Twitter can create a custom audience.
Step 3
Log into or if you don’t have one yet, create your Twitter Ads account at https://ads.twitter.com
Step 4
Create a new tailored audience in your Twitter Ads account by uploading the exported list from Backer Directory.
Upload backer file from your computer
After uploading it may take minutes to hours until Twitter creates your tailored audience.
Step 5
Once Twitter has processed your new tailored audience, you can create a new Twitter ad and set your “Crowdfunding Backers” audience as the target audience. You will be amazed by how much better your crowdfunding campaign ads will be performing once you’ve fed Twitter your list of super backers from Backer Directory.
Here’s to the success of your crowdfunding campaign!
