No one can deny that the cryptocurrency industry is a highly competitive market with many new projects launching every day. With a very high business mortality rate, newcomers in the space should bring their A-game, not only in terms of the technological innovation they want to offer but also in building a community of believers that will support their initiative. The community plays a vital part in ensuring the success of any crypto project. It serves as the primary source of its demand as well as its main social media defender when attacked.
Unknown to many outsiders, the cryptocurrency society is not one homogeneous unit that rallies behind one cryptocurrency. In reality, it is highly fragmented, made up of smaller groups that support various projects. Unsurprisingly, the biggest communities are from the biggest cryptocurrencies in the market such as bitcoin, ethereum, and XRP communities. Members of these communities are very passionate and are steadfast to defend their supported projects when anyone tries to malign its credibility or try to put it in a bad light.
The importance of crypto communities can never be overstated. Aside from being the primary driver of a project’s demand it also provides massive free marketing through word of mouth and social media marketing. Moreover, experienced community members act as free first-line support for newbies and first-time users of cryptocurrencies while highly technical community members can often become community developer contributors if the project is open-sourced. Crypto communities are so important that some believe it is as important as the underlying technology of the project itself.
However, building a vibrant, resilient and loyal community of believers is very much different from building a distributed ledger for decentralized applications. There is no code to learn or exact mathematical equations to follow. It is more fluid and dynamic requiring a continuous effort of refinements and adjustments to cater to the ever-changing sentiments of its community members. There is a need to discuss time-proven strategies on how to build crypto communities. Hence we will share with you the top 5 crypto community-building strategies.
Top 5 Crypto Community-Building Strategies
1. Create the Project’s Narrative
Create a compelling narrative behind your project that will ultimately describe the reason why the project exists. This story should titillate the imagination of the new and old community members and inculcate in them the belief that the project has immense value and utility not only to them but to the greater society. Early in the project, there should be an effort to indoctrinate the team’s values, ideas, and attitudes to its community members. Of course, this narrative should not be made out of thin air and should truthfully convey the purpose of the project’s existence.
A good example of a cryptocurrency that has created a compelling narrative behind its existence is bitcoin. It tells of a story of a new asset type that will liberate the people from the unfair and prevailing monetarily system that is designed to favor the rich and marginalized the poor. This new asset type is called bitcoin and powered by a new revolutionary technology called the blockchain. It guarantees that no single entity will have the opportunity to turn it into a tool of financial weapon to punish or oppress. The impact of this narrative to this day has turned many naysayers into true believers.
2. Use Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has become an essential component of any digital marketing campaign. Hence any cryptocurrency project seeking to grow their community should have a strong presence in social media to spread awareness about their project which is also a good starting point to start the brand’s narrative. It can be an effective and cost-efficient marketing strategy for many crypto projects to grow their community. There are billions of users online that use social media and continue to grow as the world becomes more digitized and connected.
According to a crypto-centric advertising firm Coinzilla, the top communication channels used by crypto projects are Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, LinkedIn, and Medium. YouTube is also included in the list but due to their ongoing cryptocurrency crackdown, the effectiveness of using YouTube is under question. Twitter, on the other hand, tops all social media venues of crypto project communications channels. Some of the most successful projects leveraged Twitter making it a cheap yet effective marketing tool to onboard new users into their projects.
3. Incentivize Your Community
Engagement is one of the key elements to keep the community involved and active. One of the best ways to keep them this way is to incentivize them to do so. There are many ways to do this such as referral programs, AMA events, social media contests, trading competitions, meme contests, rewarded social media tasks, airdrops, free giveaways, and the list goes on. Some projects launch full-blown bounty programs where participants are asked to do different tasks ranging from social media activities to content creation.
One of the most prolific Twitter users is Justin Sun, the founder of the Tron Network. He has amassed more than 2 million followers creating one of the largest crypto-related social media accounts in the world. While not all of his followers are bullish on his project, bashers and trolls unwittingly contribute to spreading the awareness of his projects. His popularity or infamy in posting highly controversial statements seems to stir up the crypto twitter community with the Tron community egging him on and others calling him out or lambasting him for his statements.
4. Manage Your Community
Proper management of communities is also important to ensure the continued growth of the community as well as keeping it aligned with what the project has set out to do. To be able to do this it is of utmost importance to have someone manage the community. Most of the bigger crypto communities have volunteers or hired community managers to keep things in order. Binance is a good example of a crypto-related organization that hires community managers to manage their social media accounts on telegram. This is on top of Changpeng Zhao “CZ,” the Binance CEO, directly engaging the crypto community through his Twitter account.
The presence of official representatives or even founders of projects in social media that readily engage the community can give a huge boost of confidence in any crypto project. It projects a sense of security and legitimacy for the said project. This has been an effective strategy of Justin Sun and Changpeng Zhao especially at times when there is an enormous amount of FUD being floated around by trolls and dissidents. We can say that they have mastered the art of managing their community by continuously engaging the community.
5. Get Professional Help
Sometimes it is better to leave the crypto community-building activities to professionals. There are many of them out there and they have the experience, connection, and know-how in building a community fast and efficiently. Many of them have a comprehensive list of service offerings ranging from copywriting services, community building and management, social media marketing, SEO services, and other marketing-related services to increase awareness about the project and increase the project’s value through the network effect.
Professional community-builders may prove to be a more cost-efficient and faster way of building community as they have the necessary infrastructure and systems in place to onboard new users. They can also help them get listed in exchanges or launch an initial exchange offering (IEO). Since most of them have already gone through the process of listing they have a better idea of how to pass the often rigorous process of listing. Listing is important as it opens up new markets for the projects adding a new territory where the project to grow.
Conclusion
There are many more ways to grow a crypto community but we have found the suggested strategies the most efficient and effective. The project team can always go through mainstream crypto-related media to spread awareness of their projects or tap crypto influencers to increase their social media coverage.
There is even a new way of crypto community-building dubbed as social mining, which can be described as a more sophisticated way of cultivating a community of true believers by applying certain quantifiable attributes to compute their rewards. However, this is relatively new and needs time to prove itself as an effective tool of community building.
What do you think of our list? Do you agree with what we have said above? Let us know in the comment sections provided, we always welcome constructive criticism and any factual corrections in our articles. We hope this article has been informative and helpful.
About the author: Jesús is a doctor turned cryptocurrency and blockchain enthusiast who loves sharing his thoughts on cryptocoinsociety.com to help simply crypto in order to make it more accessible to the masses.