Issue #03: Growing your crypto community
Campaign idea with a how-to that can help you engage with your community members right away.
Hey hi hello,
It's Jun and Louise—your friends who once promised you that we would be sharing useful tips and ideas about the crypto community building every single week. Well, not going to lie, we feel pretty guilty about it, and thank you for sticking around, reading our newsletter, and supporting us!
You are probably wondering what we've been up to in the past few weeks. Things have been crazy (exciting) for us—from onboarding a few brand new Stacks Chapters to prepping for launching the $GEL token. You know what they say, Crypto Never Sleeps.
In our past series, we covered topics such as the fundamentals of building your crypto community. And after discussing its building blocks, it's time for us to go in-depth about establishing a growth engine that will help scale your community.
There're many ways to grow your community, and we're always discovering more tactics that are not in our standard growth playbook as tokenized model plays a significant role in crypto strategies. Here're a few tested growth hacks that actually worked well for us.
AMA Series: A classic growth strategy for any crypto project or community
Think of it as your normal basic flyer distribution tactic where team members or even founders (more effective in our opinion) go on the ground. In this case, they go into a token community on Telegram or Discord and answer questions about the project, such as its mission, token distribution, future roadmap, and other overview questions prepared by the mods before opening the discussion to their community. Also, you can make a special announcement around the project, a little alpha leak of the product, and something exclusive to boost the AMA (Ask Me Anything) engagement.
Some of the token communities we like the most and had the highest conversion based on our experience are Binance Spain, Binance Turkey, Binance Russia, Kucoin Russia, OKEx English, and Satoshi Club.
You'd be surprised at how going off the ground can funnel lifelong community members to your project. To be more effective, an airdrop of $500 to $3,000 might be worth spending. Usually, top-tier communities like Binance are hefty and only do AMA with projects listed on the platform.
One should also be careful in collaborating with token communities. There're many groups with a high number of community members but don't have a good conversion and questionable approaches, so you'd better be wary of those and try to double-check their stats through Combot or Tgstat.
If you don't have a token or not a token-based project yet, but you want to raise your brand awareness, co-hosting an AMA with other communities would be a good idea. For example, we collaborated with Polygon (formerly known as Matic) to help Battle Racers spread the word about their upcoming NFT game launch. During the AMA, the team dropped some serious alpha and the members from both communities were very excited. Plus, hosting a Reddit AMA is still a great way to reach thousands of people at once. But if you have a forum on your website, you can host the AMA over there like this one AMA with Marguerite deCourcelle from Neon District — it helps drive a good amount of traffic to your site.
If you have a developer community, inviting guest speakers to join and share invaluable knowledge and experience would be the most effective way to engage your members. Who doesn't love quick lessons from the masters, and not to mention, you will get to chat with them and ask them anything. Some examples: (oh gosh, we're still learning something new while going through all those AMAs!):
Retweet Campaigns: The quickest way to boost the visibility
If you're all about visibility to increase your reach and engagement, a Retweet Campaign is all you need. It easy to set up and for any community members to participate in. To enter a crypto Retweet Campaign, all they need to do is "hit" the Retweet button on your Twitter contest post.
It's not one of our favorites as this campaign is all about vanity metrics and can be easily gameable, and the retention is pretty questionable. We mainly used CCTip in the past to boost our retweet campaigns.
Event Amplification: Our favorite and the most underrated growth strategy
This is one of our favorites and probably one of the most underrated growth strategies out there.
A simple tactic goes a long, long way. We highly suggest putting all your upcoming events on sites, such as CoinMarketCap Event Calendar and CoinMarketCal, from your product releases, token burn, staking campaigns to community events like AMAs.
Once you add all your ongoing community events, site crawlers that most token community use will pick it up, repost it in their socials and announcement channels. This way, you amplify your project free of charge to various token communities like CryptoDiffer, ICOPantera, TopTraders RU, and many more.
Community Retention Campaigns: Listen up and level up
Growing the community is all about listening and paying attention to your community's desire. They usually know how to make it more fun while learning and bringing more members to the community. For example, the Stacks community suggested some excellent relationship-building campaigns, such as community quizzes, memes, and activity competitions. All of which are battle-tested for retention.
These are specific campaigns that add a little bit of personality to your community. Memes that will come out can be used in various stan accounts and repurposed in socials. It can also be turned into a whole sticker and emoji pack for Telegram and Discord, for what it's worth. We have a budget of around $150 to $500 for this kind of campaign.
Now, there are a lot of strategies to grow your initial community but we wanted to start with easy to execute tactics that we think are of high leverage. Like you, we're learning every day in the blockchain space and will release more growth tactics in the next coming issues. So stay tuned!
Some useful tools that come in handy
Canva & Kapwing: free tools that help you make beautiful posters and videos in less than 10 minutes
Combot & Tgstat: help you check and verify Telegram group stats
Gleam: a platform where you can host giveaway campaign and contests
CCTip: allows you to send crypto tips
😻 Here comes the fun part…
Mattia x CCH Limited Edition NFT giveaway
We're giving away limited edition NFT by the one and only Mattia Cuttini. Mattia is an Italian artist who is one of the early pioneers in the crypto art world and has been showcasing his work on major crypto art platforms, such as SuperRare and KnownOrigin.
About Mattia Cuttini
Mattia Cuttini observes the world with curiosity since 1979, inventing things and tunes to respond to them. He studied electronics and worked in the sector for ten years. Out of necessity, he reinvented himself as a web and graphic designer. His creative drive brought him to the intersection of art and blockchain.
Always a musician, over the past ten years, he has broadened his artistic research by experimenting with visual and performance art. Multiple experiences in these fields let him realize that his practice is a matter of layers, overlapping interventions. Studying the different levels underlying his creations is what stimulates him to continue his research. His work is in major public and private collections, including the crypto-exclusive Metapurse collection.
If you'd like to know more about Mattia, here's his recent interview:
A Conversation With Mattia Cuttini About Crypto Art and Technological Error
About Nina the Cat
"Here is the portrait of Nina created using my rubber stamps, with some help from the collage technique too. I've used an original photo as a reference. Handmade as always. From analog to digital one more time. Designed for Jun and Louise at The Crypto Community Handbook newsletter." — Mattia
How to claim your own Mattia Cuttini x CCH Limited Edition NFT
Step 1: Make sure to subscribe to The Crypto Community Handbook newsletter by May 23, 2021
Step 2: If you're being a little generous, share a Tweet/post about us, tell people what you’ve learned, and tag us @CommunityHBK
Step 3: Fill out the form: Mattia x CCH Limited Edition NFT giveaway
We will be sending the NFT to your Polygon address by May 25, 2021, then you will be able to see the NFT on your OpenSea.
A step-by-step guide on how to get your Polygon (Matic) account address via MetaMask
Go to MetaMask (web), install and create your own MetaMask account
Go to Matic Wallet
Connect using your MetaMask Wallet
Click "Sign" and wait for the confirmation
Copy the full address “Account“ on the top right corner
You can check the address on your MetaMask, too, if you choose "Matic Mainnet":
Happy NFTing!
Love you and mean it,
Jun & Louise
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Looking forward to the next one
Great as always, and the periods between issues isn't an issue. It's all about quality, not quantity.