Thunderclap: A great, free tool for authors
The other day, I had an email from award-winning author and friend, Jackie Weger. She wanted to let me know she’s releasing a new book later this month and asked me to support her campaign on a site called Thunderclap. Of course, I clicked on the link she gave me right away, where Thunderclap has listed the details of her upcoming book, ‘No Perfect Secret”. It looked like she had set a target of a 100 people to share the news of her new book on their social media accounts, all at the same time, on the release date of September 24th. Jackie has already managed to get over 80 people to sign up . This means she stands a rather good chance of getting her message out on the big day in a rather booming voice. I was intrigued – what a genius idea! It’s like employing a book promotion company to get the tongues wagging for you, except it costs you nothing.
Signing up to support Jackie’s campaign took me seconds and it was as easy as A-B-C. Basically, you sign on your Facebook account and you follow the prompts as to allow Thunderclap to send out Jackie’s message on the day. Please note that Thunderclap will never use your passwords or FB friend list and will never post anything else other than that one single message through your account.
Next, I set a tweet to be sent out also via my Twitter account. Done!
Thunderclap is an innovative site that’s characterized as a crowd-speaking platform. This is similar to a crowd-funding platform except that instead of donating money, people donate their social reach ONLY FOR THE SPECIFIC, SINGLE MESSAGE. As people’s FB posts and tweets about any campaign will go out together, they create an attention-grabbing impact in the way that a flash mob does. Genius, right?
I’m sharing here below the 2-minute promotional video of Thunderclap. It’s worth watching!
You will see that quite a few celebrities use this amazing platform to put their messages across, creating trends online instantly because of the high volume of accounts that carry the message together at the same time. And if it’s good enough for The White House, you bet it’s good enough for a newbie author like me; especially as I can opt for the free subscription and raise my voice over the online murmur around the world without spending a penny. Not bad, huh?
I’m still grateful to Jackie for introducing me to this site and you know me; I just had to share the great news. That morning, as I went around the house doing my morning chores, my eyes remained glazed over for quite a while; my mind exploring ceaselessly the possible applications of this amazing tool!
Okay, so I could announce my new releases with Thunderclap; but what about using it as a promo tool? What if I could plan my next free promo or Kindle Countdown Deal well in advance and recruit the kindness of 100 friends or even strangers to share the message with me on the big day?
Surely, if you’re an author and if you give it a thought for a minute like I have, your own eyes will start to glaze over too!
The more I think about this site, the more I get enthused. I will leave you to your own brilliant ideas of how you can use it and if you come up with anything new, please comment below to share it, won’t you?
If you’re the type who likes to have a second choice, check out also the crowd-speaking platform, “Headtalker”.
Note: If you’ve found this post useful, please consider taking a minute to support Jackie’s campaign here. She deserves some online love for introducing us to Thunderclap, surely. Thank you, peeps!
