Community Building and Management in the Crypto Market – A study on 682 Projects

Of all the marketing activities of a crypto project, community building and community management turn out to be the most reliable and least expensive forms of PR in the long run. 

In the last decade, more and more companies realized the importance of building an online community around their brands. 

Brands like Taco Bell, Netflix, and Go Pro are doing it right. They manage to engage with the community, solve problems, and gain user-generated content, all while looking as humane as possible.

Communities found their applications in the Cryptocurrency market as well. The crypto community is made up of people that 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, if so.

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

Build your online community

Find the crypto community

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

People interested in cryptocurrencies are definitely 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 in 2022 are:

• Facebook – 2.9 bln 
• YouTube – 2.5 bln 
• WhatsApp – 2.0 bln 
• Instagram – 1.4 bln 
• WeChat – 1.2 bln 

Many people argue about the popularity of these platforms in the crypto industry. So naturally, we decided to take a deeper look into this matter. 

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

Our findings

• The top 5 communication channels used by crypto projects are: Twitter (92.8%), Facebook (73%), Telegram (67.9%), Linkedin (42.1%), Medium (41.2%).
• 18.91% of the crypto projects we looked at are present 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. 
• Channels such as LINE, Vk, BiYong, Weibo, and WeChat are popular in the Asian market.
• On average, crypto projects use 5.01 communication channels.
• Besides external communication channels, 44.43% of the projects in our sample also have some form of internal communication channels, such as a blog, a news section, or a forum.

You should also consider having a G2 Crowd and Glassdoor profile. Every single cryptocurrency influencer and publication advise their followers to do their research. Naturally, your audience will 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.

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 are going to 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 of doing this is by running a PR campaign and distributing press releases on some of the top websites in the industry through Coinzilla Marketplace.

Leverage Social Media platforms

Getting back to the top 5 communication channels used by the crypto projects, Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin are mostly used for disseminating updates and other info. There is a certain level of interactivity in them, 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 is a combination of 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, and you can either 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 own blog would require. You have to 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 that already have 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 before, Telegram is the top messaging app used in the Crypto Market. For a long time, every legitimate crypto project has had an official Telegram channel. 

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

Communicate through your own website

It’s also a good idea to integrate an internal communication channel, such as a blog, news section, or forum. 44.43% of the crypto projects from our research choose to talk to 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 way, you will bring more organic traffic, consisting of users that are looking for information and explanations. 

Being a primary source of knowledge for your audience will make users come back 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 you have to look for new members all by 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 growth of the community. 

If your project is a token or a coin, you can just give them a number of units for each person they get in. If you’re a cloud mining platform, you can give a better rate. 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 in a short amount of time.

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 value, not false hopes.

Manage your online community

Monitoring

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

It’s not mandatory to use advanced tools in order to build a crypto community, but you have to monitor the platforms you communicate on and check the notifications regularly.

Ideally, you should keep track of traffic, engagement, and members. 

Traffic measuring on social media may be quite difficult to do, especially if you want more meaningful insights. You may get a number of visits to your business pages, but you can’t really 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 make sure it is alive. Therefore, to measure engagement, see how many people are coming to the community and how many are engaging in conversations. You should keep an eye on 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, take a 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.    

Engaging

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

• Start debates. Debates are a great way to have people get accustomed to each other as long as they take place in a professional and civil climate. A debate can start on any of 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 any kind of 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 make a change to your product. 
• Competitions. Prizes are a great way to activate idle community members. You can get more engagement and even extend your community by periodically organizing contests and competitions.

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 is not a market that works like any other. You don’t just come up with 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.