Hi, I’m Jessica, and I want to promote your campaign.

I joined the S&S team a few months ago, and one of my tasks is to do our social media posts and promotions. As our philosophy is “filmmakers first”, I try to promote several currently crowdfunding campaigns per day.

I can’t tell you how badly I want to help your campaign succeed. Oh man, I want to get into your campaign page and grab those sexy loglines (consensually), find your twitter handles, and mention your crazy campaign incentives. But many times, I go to a campaign and it takes too long to find that information, or it simply isn’t there.

And one thing I don’t have a lot of is time. I’m doing the Supermarket Sweep version of campaign promotion so I can then attend to all of my other tasks that keep the S&S train moving.

So, I’m asking you, please, will you help me help you? I’ve got 140 characters to get people clicking, funding, and following your campaign. Let’s make them count.

Here are 6 ways you can help this girl out (in no particular order):

HAVE A TWITTER HANDLE. Dear sweet deity, please have a twitter handle. A handle that is connected to your campaign page. Your personal handle, or one for your project. Or at least a hashtag for your film. When I use the handles of the filmmakers, the message is more personal, and you can actually see the promotions going out. If you just absolutely KNOW your audience is not on Twitter, that’s fine. I will still promote your project (but I may question your choices).

HAVE UNIQUE INCENTIVES. We are on the hunt for unique incentives to share and inspire. I’m not going to give shout outs to signed posters, copies of scripts, or early viewing options. Everybody does that. What I’m looking for is the cool sharable graphic people can post after they fund you. Or the theme-specific perk people wouldn’t find anywhere else. It doesn’t need to be costly to fulfill, just creative. The best of these get featured to our newsletter (which goes out to tens of thousands of human people).

MAKE SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS IN WEEK ONE. If you’re killing it straight out of the gate, that catches everyone’s attention. Everyone loves a winner, and if you look like you are rocketing to the finish line, people will respond. If it looks like you know what you are doing with your campaign, you probably know what you’re doing with your film. Do your homework so you have some solid campaign action in week one.

HAVE A CATCHY LOG LINE IN LESS THAN 100 CHARACTERS. Again, Twitter allows only 140 characters per tweet. About 15 of those will go towards the shortened URL link. How can you draw people in with a log line that is shorter than 100 characters? And make sure you use the description area for your pitch video wisely. What is your film about? What genre? What’s the tone? What is unique about your project? Saying it’s a “passion project” isn’t going to compel a share, because technically, every film is kind of a passion project.

HAVE A GOOD LANDING IMAGE FOR YOUR PITCH VIDEO (AND SHAREABLE MEDIA). When people come to your campaign page, they need a something to draw them into that pitch video. I don’t want to go over the nuances of a good pitch vid (we have that here and here), but have an on-brand image that will get folks to press play. Please also have high res, striking images to share in your media section. This is especially important if we are sharing your campaign in our newsletter. Otherwise it may end up being a mildly unattractive screen grab.

TELL US OF ANY MATCHING DRIVES. If you have a matching donor for any part of your campaign, please let us know. We want you to get the most amplification for that stretch of time. Again, we want you to raise as much as possible for your project. Let us help.

These are the easiest things you can do to make your campaign more shareable. If you are on Twitter, join the conversation! If you’re engaging your audience, the higher the likelihood your campaign will succeed.

It’s also important to note that we are not a PR company. I try to promote every campaign at least once (hopefully much more than that), but it is not in our responsibility to promote your campaign. That is YOUR responsibility. We just want to amplify your message. Also, I can’t respond to every tweet that mentions S&S. If you would like a certain response, please use an explicit CTA (call to action), that way I’ll know what you want me to do.

Thanks for helping me out, friends. I can’t wait to see what projects you create.

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Learn more about social media messaging for your campaign with this video.