What is ‘crowdspeaking’ and could it help you reach a bigger audience for your business?

Platforms like Thunderclap are offering people, causes and brands the opportunity to aggregate their social media reach by using “crowdspeaking”, which is a way of coordinating all your social media support together for one campaign in order to break through and get your message heard.

The idea of aggregating the power of your social media voice is appealing to businesses because reaching an audience organically can be hard. With more than 50 million business pages now on Facebook, it can be incredibly tough to cut through and get your message out there.

Creating new content, posting and monitoring a business page can often feel like a thankless task, which is why it’s important to have a strategy in place that tempers unrealistic expectations and concentrates on engaging content. As I’ve said here before, everyone would love their posts to go viral, but the name of the game is to consistently connect with the people that matter most to your business.

The two biggest crowdspeaking platforms are Thunderclap and HeadTalker.

Thunderclap was launched in 2009 but has really come into its own in the past couple of years. It lists among its most successful case studies as the launch of TV show The Tim Ferriss Experiment, the launch of Aliza Licht’s book Leave Your Mark, and the incredible campaign that saw inventor Dave Hakkens take his Phone Bloks idea to a social audience reach of 381,762,861.

How it works is that you can sign up to create a campaign via Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. Once you’ve done that you fill out all the relevant details for your campaign, including such things as message, destination URL, and supporter goal for your message, which could be small (100 supporters), medium (250), or large (500).

Thunderclap explains what it does like this:

Thunderclap is a tool that lets a message be heard when you and your fiends say it together. Think of it as an “online flash mob.” Join a Thunderclap, and you and others will share the same message at the same time, spreading an idea through Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr that cannot be ignored.

So in essence it’s a way to pool your network strength and resources in order to rise above the daily din of social media noise.

HeadTalker has emerged as the main alternative to Thunderclap. It works along the same lines as Thunderclap but also features a marketplace function that allows you to engage the services of “sellers” who, for a price, allow your message to go out to their networks.

HeadTalker hasn’t been around as long as Thunderclap but is worth having a look at if you’re considering undertaking a crowdspeaking campaign. Probably because it has been around for longer, Thunderclap appears to have higher profile brands on its client list while HeadTalker seems to be more the domain for startups and musicians and authors seeking to boost their publicity and profile via social media.

Since both platforms provide their base level service for free, it’s worth checking them out and playing around with a trial run or two to get the hang of how they work. Thunderclap does have premium options, for which they charge fees, while HeadTalker is free until you start looking to engage sellers to aggregate your message.

Either way, using a crowdspeaking platform might be just the boost your campaign needs in order to get some traction.

Fi Bendall is CEO of The Bendalls Group, a business that leads STRATEGY : ADVOCACY : MOBILE delivering the business acumen to drive effective positive results in a disruptive economy for the C-suite. Fi has recently won a Westpac/AFR 2015 100 Women of Influence award.