Inferring the impacts of social media on crowdfunding

Abstract

Crowdfunding -in which people can raise funds through collaborative contributions of general public (i.e., crowd) -has emerged as a billion dollars business for supporting more than one million ventures. However, very few research works have examined the process of crowdfunding. In particular, none has studied how social networks help crowdfunding projects to succeed. To gain insights into the effects of social networks in crowdfunding, we analyze the hidden connections between the fundraising results of projects on crowdfunding websites and the corresponding promotion campaigns in social media. Our analysis considers the dynamics of crowdfunding from two aspects: how fundraising activities and promotional activities on social media simultaneously evolve over time, and how the promotion campaigns influence the final outcomes. From our investigation, we identify a number of important principles that provide a useful guide for devising effective campaigns. For example, we observe temporal distribution of customer interest, strong correlations between a crowdfunding project's early promotional activities and the final outcomes, and the importance of concurrent promotion from multiple sources. We then show that these discoveries can help predict several important quantities, including overall popularity and the success rate of the project. Finally, we show how to use these discoveries to help design crowdfunding sites.

Antecedents of Project Success in Donation-based Crowdfunding-based on Tencent LeJuan Platform in China

“…He also pointed out that the project financing duration negatively affect the financing success rate, because longer period of investment will reduce enthusiasm for the investment [7]. Many researchers found that the impact of the target amount on financial performance on project success rate is negative [8][9][10][11][12]. Some found that the impact of the number of projects initiated and updates on financial performance has positive effects [8,10].…”

Donation Behavior in Online Micro Charities: An Investigation of Charitable Crowdfunding Projects

“…Crowdfunding project characteristics refer to the project attributes that relate to the funding decision. These attributes are reputation of initiator [29], popularity of crowdfunding project [51], and crowdfunding project content quality [59].…”

Evaluating Crowdfunding From the Perspective of Public Relations

“…Analysis studies aimed to determine how updates about the campaign affect the result of the campaign in the process of campaign (Xu et al, 2014); qualitative studies aimed to search effects of internal social capital on the campaign (Colombo et al, 2015); researches aimed to determine the effects of the creator of the campaign on the campaign (Wojciechowski, 2009); the effects of individual and aggregate studies on the campaign (Hui et al, 2014); studies aimed to determine the effects of social media on crowdfunding (Lu et al, 2014). It can be seen that the studies generally focus on searching success and effect level of the campaign when these studies are analysed.…”