Assessing the sustainability of crowdfunding in social media and Google trends

Abstract

This paper aims to assess the degree to which sustainability, namely, economic, social, environmental and institutional dimensions are integrated within the public discourse on crowdfunding in social media and in Google Trends. The utilizing Social Media Analytics and Google Trends search queries, respectively, we track discussions on crowdfunding in user-generated content published in social media and analyse the Google Trends queries. Quantitative methodology, namely, multivariate analysis and econometric models was used, in order nowcast the insights about the importance of the sustainability dimensions in the crowdfunding. The results show an interesting trend of increasing popularity search terms in sustainability dimensions as a proxi of marketing strategies to involve the participants in the crowdfunding projects.