The Impact of Social Media on Leetchi Crowdfunding Projects Success

摘要

Crowdfunding platforms have known an increasing interest during the last decade. The global crowdfunding industry estimates the fundraising volume to be up to $60 Billion in 2016, surpassing traditional forms of finance. Crowdfunding by counterparts and lending have been extensively studied but, until now, only a small amount of research was focused on donation-based platforms. In this paper, we propose a first analysis of the Leetchi donation crowdfunding platform and of an impact of social network activity on project success. The project success insights covered in this article could guide the project owners into more successful decisions and strategies on social media. We collected and analyzed the Twitter activity related to Leetchi projects from November 1^{st to November 30th , 2016 obtaining a set of 19,000 tweets mentioning 438 Leetchi projects. We define and investigate seven social media features: the number of tweets, number of profiles, number of influencers, audience of the top influencer, the average number of followers and friends and statuses of people mentioning the projects. We also model Leetchi social media campaigns as a diffusion graph and extend our analysis with eight additional features: the order, the size, the number of connected components, the average in/out-degrees, the weighted average in/out-degrees and the density of the diffusion graph. Finally, we study the predictive power of all 15 features on the various levels of success of Leetchi projects using machine learning algorithms. We found that while traditional social media metrics allows predicting the reach of small funding (from 1€ to 100€), social network features allow better distinguish projects with a high level of funding (from 100€ to 1,000€).}