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[joe_eyemobi]

Hey guys, has anyone here used Thunderclap for their social media marketing?

I've done a bit of googling and people seem pretty divided about its usefulness.  On one hand it could get a single focused message out on the day, on the other hand it could be seen as a bit spammy.

What are your thoughts if you've used it or seen a campaign that uses it?

https://www.thunderclap.it

[WildFactor]

We use it for our kickstarter.
Even if it's legit, we had to convince our friend that it was ok to give access to their facebook/twitter account.
I don't think it looks spammy if people don't receive 10 times your same message

Look at https://headtalker.com/. It has more free option (but it's less known than thunderclap).

[Alternate Craig]

Thanks to both of you, as someone who hates social media either of these tools might actually leverage its usefulness without the pain.

That said, recent post mortems I've read list social media as ineffectual compared to Let's Play videos.

Any thoughts or experiences on this?

[joe_eyemobi]

Thanks to both of you, as someone who hates social media either of these tools might actually leverage its usefulness without the pain.

That said, recent post mortems I've read list social media as ineffectual compared to Let's Play videos.

Any thoughts or experiences on this?

No way, social media is a really important part of any marketing campaign. It might not be as effective as a big name youtuber/streamer playing your game, but still useful even only if you put a little effort into it. 

I'm going to write up a postmortem after full release in a few days, and put in as much stats/info as I'm allowed to without violating Valve's NDAs etc. 

[Alternate Craig]

Thanks to both of you, as someone who hates social media either of these tools might actually leverage its usefulness without the pain.

That said, recent post mortems I've read list social media as ineffectual compared to Let's Play videos.

Any thoughts or experiences on this?

No way, social media is a really important part of any marketing campaign. It might not be as effective as a big name youtuber/streamer playing your game, but still useful even only if you put a little effort into it. 

I'm going to write up a postmortem after full release in a few days, and put in as much stats/info as I'm allowed to without violating Valve's NDAs etc. 

A postmortem would be really handy for finding the correlations. What I suspect is that there are formulae at work re: a proportional relationship between the product, audience and medium. So Twitter works for certain things but not others - but not absolutely, moreso based on one or more variables.

I found the postmortem I was referring to previously here:

https://medium.com/@treeform/istrolid-s-greenlight-experience-57646237ee31#.82m5906ty

So it would be interesting to see how your experience correlates/differs and then, perhaps with enough of these reports side by side, the community could start to isolate those variables and see if some sort of consistent algorithm emerges that can somewhat predict whether a campaign will succeed.

Basically Growth Hacking.

It won't be expressed as an algorithm, but that's what it will be nonetheless.

[alexp]

I'm not sure I'm running one at the moment to test it out. I've got 7 out of 100 backers so far after a few hours lol! You need the campaign to be filled for it to run too so you need to promote the Thunderclap a lot I think...

The problem is people click the link and think that's it but actually they need to click support and then authorise Thunderclap to access Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr and that is a bit of a hurdle for those who don't know how to support properly or have trust issues with Thunderclap.

[bdsowers]

We tried to use Thunderclap. Even among team members, it was hard to get buy-in to actually *use* it. This was an established company with a sizable fan-base, and we saw little returns from it. These were early Thunderclap days though, so more people might be willing to look at it.

It... can't hurt, though? That's a wild guess, maybe it can. But if you've got people willing to support it, might as well try.