Shock and awe: Loudness and unpredictability in Twitter messages and crowdfunding campaign success

Abstract

Although recent evidence has found support for the importance of social media in communicating specific messages between venture founders and their target audience, there remains a relative paucity of research regarding how specific temporal elements of social media activity are related to key venture development outcomes. In this context, the current study draws on the conceptual framework of shock advertising to understand how louder (i.e., an increasing number of tweets) and unpredictable (i.e., tweets at non-standard times) Twitter activity can improve the odds of crowdfunding success. Using a sample of Kickstarter projects between 2009 and 2018 and cross-sectional regressions (ordinary least squares and the logit model), we find that the odds of meeting goals increase 1.24 times with each percentage increase in tweets, relative to tweets in the project-category-year. The odds of success increase further with an increase in the unpredictability and number of project-category-year adjusted tweets. In an era when standing out in the social media is increasingly challenging, our findings have implications for managing social media messages during crowdfunding campaigns.

Keywords

• Crowdfunding
• Social media
• Twitter
• Unpredictability
• Venture finance