Crypto Community Building: A Study on 682 Projects

Of all a project’s marketing activities, crypto community building and community management are the most reliable and least expensive forms of PR in the long run. In the last decade, more companies have realized the importance of building an online community around their brands. 

Communities found their applications in the Cryptocurrency market as well. The crypto community comprises people who believe and are ready to invest in promising projects. Furthermore, community acceptance and adoption are vital to any crypto project for credibility, good reputation, usage, proof of authenticity, and network strength.

Therefore it is essential to understand what community-building tools you have before trying to adapt your crypto marketing strategy.

Build Your Online Community

1. Find the Crypto Community

Whether your project is a coin, token, crypto gambling platform, or mining platform, you first have to identify the platforms where your audience is and then decide where you will interact with them. 

People interested in cryptocurrencies are present on big social media channels and community platforms. If we were to look at the number of users worldwide, the top 5 social networks are:

1. Facebook;
2. YouTube;
3. Instagram;
4. WhatsApp; 
5. TikTok. 

Many people argue about the popularity of these platforms in the crypto industry. So, naturally, we decided to investigate this matter further. 

In 2019, we conducted research and established a sample of 682 crypto projects from around the world, checking what communication channels they use. The projects’ profiles included ICOs, gambling platforms, mining platforms, crypto exchanges, apps, and many more. 

2. Our findings

The top 5 communication channels used by crypto projects are:

1. Twitter (92.8%);
2. Facebook (73%);
3. Telegram (67.9%);
4. Linkedin (42.1%);
5. Medium (41.2%).

Top online channels: 18.91% of the crypto projects we looked at are on at least one other channel, such as:

• LINE;
• BiYong;
• StackExchange;
• Keybase;
• KiwiIRC;
• Meetup;
• TALK;
• Discuss.status.im;
• Gitlab;
• Vimeo;
• Slack;
• StackOverflow;
• Skype;
• WhatsApp;
• Band;
• Pinterest;
• Gab;
• ZenDesk;
• JQ. 

Popular channels within the Asian market:

• LINE;
• Vk;
• BiYong;
• Weibo;
• WeChat.

In addition to these striking stats, crypto projects use an average of 5.01 communication channels. Also, 44.43% of the projects in our sample have some form of internal communication channel, such as a blog, a news section, or a forum.

You should also consider having a G2 Crowd and Glassdoor profile. Every cryptocurrency influencer and publication advises their followers to do their research, so your audience will naturally be looking for reviews on your company.

Let’s get back to influencers and publications. When someone looks up cryptocurrency information, he will google it or search for a trusted source. Such trusted sources are CoinMarketCap, Coindoo, and Hacker Noon.

3. Get Users to Join Your Crypto Community

Have Trusted Publications Write About You

Now that you know where the community hangs around, decide on the touchpoints you will use and start building your crypto community. Renowned crypto publications are a great way to have your audience learn more about your project and join your community. 

One way to do this is to run a PR campaign and distribute press releases on some of the top industry websites through Coinzilla Marketplace.

Leverage Social Media Platforms

Getting back to the top 5 communication channels used by crypto projects, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are mostly used for disseminating updates and other info. They have a certain level of interactivity, but Telegram is the top channel in the crypto market when it comes to direct communication.

Facebook and LinkedIn offer some handy options. Both social media offer groups. You can create paid ads, target your audience, and ask them to go to your group through the link you inserted in the ad’s text and join. 

Facebook and LinkedIn may look similar to a certain degree, but it’s essential to discern between the types of people you will find in each, specifically, the reason they are there. Facebook is rather used to keep in touch with family and people you know. On the other hand, Linkedin is meant for a professional environment and business-related communication.

As for Twitter, it is a lot more informal and fast-paced. To build a Twitter community, you must be very proactive and give people reasons to follow you. Participate in conversations, use relevant hashtags, tweet significant information, and retweet other people’s content. Twitter offers paid ads as well.

Medium combines a blogging platform, a social network, and a magazine. It’s a platform where you start from 0 and go wherever you want with it. Medium is based on quality content; you can create new content dedicated to the platform or publish the best articles you already have. 

Getting successful on Medium requires almost the same brand-building process your blog would require. You must publish great content and get traffic (organic, paid, or social). However, Medium may pick your article and put it on the front page if it performs well (this usually happens to publications with a massive community), or you can pay for a boost.  

SIDENOTE. Take into consideration that cryptocurrency-related ads have certain restrictions on social media. Before deciding to advertise your crypto projects on any platform, check the advertising policies.  

Use Messaging Platforms

As mentioned, Telegram is the top messaging app used in the Crypto Market. Every legitimate crypto project has had an official Telegram channel for a long time. 

Create your channel and invite your audience to join it through the link.

Communicate Through Your Website

Integrating an internal communication channel, such as a blog, news section, or forum, is also a good idea. 44.43% of the crypto projects from our research choose to communicate with their community through their website. 

Communicate about your product, how it works, its features, and its capabilities. Also, explain related topics and offer innovative ways to approach the domain. This will bring you more organic traffic, which consists of users who are looking for information and explanations. 

Being a primary source of knowledge for your audience will make users return to your website and improve your reputation as an authority in your niche.

Have Your Community Invite Their Friends

Building an online crypto community doesn’t mean looking for new members yourself. After you reach an initial group base, encourage them to bring in more people. Your fans will do that if they believe and assume your cause. However, people will be more motivated to pitch your project to others if there is something in it for them.

Establish incentives and referral systems for the users that help with the community’s growth. 

If your project is a token or a coin, you can just give them several units for each person they get in. You can give a better rate if you’re a cloud mining platform. If your business is in crypto gambling, give a commission.

Well-known brands such as Uber, Dropbox, and Airbnb have successfully used referral systems to gain a large community quickly. However, the referral system should not be the engine of your business. Do not try to turn into an MLM or a Ponzi. You want people to join your community because of genuine values, not false hopes.

Manage Your Online Community

1. Monitoring

Omnichannel may have become an overused term, but it’s important to be present where your customers are. Even more important is constant activity. It’s no use keeping 10 social media accounts and posting once every 2-3 months. 

It’s not mandatory to use advanced tools to build a crypto community, but you must monitor the platforms you communicate on and check the notifications regularly. Ideally, you should keep track of traffic, engagement, and members. 

Measuring social media traffic may be difficult, especially if you want more meaningful insights. You may get some visits to your business pages, but you can’t see where those visitors came from. A forum built on your website may come in handy to solve this situation, thanks to the advanced capabilities of Google Analytics.

While building a crypto community, it’s essential to ensure its health. Therefore, to measure engagement, see how many people are joining the community and engaging in conversations. You should also monitor every discussion starter and understand what gets your audience involved.

SIDENOTE. Discussion starters are learning tools used to generate dialogue and discussion among community groups.

The best-case scenario in which you can monitor your community’s growth is when the users sign up for an account on your website’s forum. You can see how many new members you get monthly and get deeper insights into their behavior. 

Even so, look at the admin panels from social media as well. You still have data about new members (for groups) and new followers (for pages). This way, you will understand if there are discrepancies in your community from one platform to another.    

2. Engaging

A big part of crypto community building and management is finding engaging activities for your members:

• Start debates. Debates are a great way for people to get accustomed to each other as long as they occur in a professional and civil climate. A debate can start on the following subjects: scams, consensus mechanisms, governmental policies, emerging projects, or opinions on diverse news from the crypto market.
• Voting. Make your community’s members feel important to your business by giving them the right to decide how the community and the product evolve. This way, you will always gain customer-approved new features. Start voting sessions regarding two of your ideas, an upgrade, a partnership, a new feature, etc.
• Testing. You may have at least heard of terms like customer experience, user experience, and conversion rate optimization. If you have a dapp, exchange, gambling platform, or website, you want your customers to love spending time on it. Your community is the perfect place to test your hypothesis when you want to change your product. 
• Competitions. Prizes are a great way to activate idle community members. Periodically organizing contests and competitions can increase engagement and even extend your community.

3. Moderating

Gathering up a bunch of different people can get stressful. Not everyone is polite and well-mannered. It’s important to have clear guidelines that are accessible to every member of your community, even before they decide to join your group.

The bigger the group, the higher the chances you will get condescending people in it, even trolls. Keeping a discussion on track, giving warnings, deleting posts or comments, or even kicking out people is indispensable for a healthy online community.

Final Thoughts

The Cryptocurrency market does not work like any other. You don’t just develop a product, advertise it, and hope it sells. For a crypto project to withstand the test of time, it needs a strong community. 

Bitcoin is the most volatile coin out there, and thanks to its community, it is still the strongest. Ethereum took a heavy blow with the DAO hacking incident in 2016, but the community stood with it. 

And there is also Ripple, whose community #XRParmy hashtag is well-known in the crypto industry.