Inferring the impacts of social media on crowdfunding

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.