The world of cryptocurrency is only a decade old and pretty nascent. While the crypto community as a whole is growing exponentially, it is still pretty minuscule compared to what it could be, as understanding blockchain and crypto is still not widespread. With only a few people to grab attention from, crypto projects take crypto community management very seriously, as each of them understands that the community is the heart of any successful crypto project. Every crypto project founder and thought leader knows that its decentralized application or dapp is only valuable as the users and community members would use it, thus making its community the most significant fuel for its token's health.
Historically, communities have been seen aligning with their favorite projects and token where they believe the project is promising and has a strong use case that could revolutionize a particular industry in days to come. This also acts as a key driver that excites online communities about the new token who, in search of financial gains and to stay updated on the project, join the project teams' telegram groups and discord communities. Active and inquisitive community members often participate in group activities, talk, share, and refer others when there is constant deep engagement and regular information sharing. But if the engagement is not deep enough, there is always a possibility that community members do give up on their loyalty and move to other projects, thus dissolving the whole essence.
To stop this migration of community members and build a strong crypto community, the project needs to invest time and money regularly and find the right talent or partner to work on the core online community-building strategies. Good community building and management aren't complicated if one sticks to the basics. All it needs is some focused time, patience, and targeted planning.
The principles of keeping the audience glued to the group activities are relatively the same for all cryptocurrency communities. All that a project needs is a seasoned professional or a partner agency with expertise in strategy and community marketing that can help stick to the basics and implement the strategies efficiently. Below are a few strategic initiatives and recommendations that could be pivotal in building and managing an active crypto community.
Know Your Vision and Define Your Goals
While this point may seem obvious to many, this is where most teams go wrong. Today, telegram and other social media platforms are filled with channels where even a novice can easily make out that these channels are moving without a clear idea of what is the final goal they are trying to achieve with these channels. Setting goals might require some thinking, and the team may feel constrained initially, but the key is to keep things close to basic. Some examples of a great community goal could be growing users and educating them about the project, raising liquidity, or acquiring more stakers for coins. A good practice here would be if the internal team sat down together, put their thoughts together, and decide on common goals as to what the final outcome should be and the progress accordingly
Community Coverage Should Be Round The Clock
The world of cryptocurrency works and trades 24/7, keeping the crypto community active round the clock. As the industry is global and not constrained by borders, the community backing a project would also have participants from all across the globe. Providing coverage around the clock to the global network of members would be critical. Customizing engagement in local timezone and languages can be an excellent driver of growth for the community. While for a single community manager, the following task might be difficult if the community manager chooses a few community members in different regions and make them unofficial mods. The unofficial mods can work after hours in their time zones and might be rewarded with freebies or early event access based on whatever the internal team plans to offer
Leave No Question Unanswered
A key trait of building a healthy community is to keep the community members satisfied with all their doubts and keep them updated on all the happenings. Providing 24/7 coverage and not leaving any questions unanswered is equally essential. Be it Twitter, Telegram, or Discord, Community
Community Managers need to prepare a system where all queries are tracked and answered (or at least seen and considered). Otherwise, they risk losing new users before they even start, or worse, they look like they don’t even care to begin with!
Make It Easy For The New Users
Community managers must take extreme care regarding how they treat new members across social media platforms. Primary education regarding the product is extremely critical and sometimes plays a critical role in community engagement and the retention of new community members. It's common to find communities where internal teams spend time on initial education, but once they achieve some milestones in terms of community members, they fall back, and education takes a backseat or is directed toward user-made education content. It is always advisable to give new members a fundamental but fulfilling engagement so that they feel part of the community. If this is a telegram community, the manager should pin the educative or these onboarding tasks on the top so that every new person is aware of the same.
Have A Reason For The Community Members To Come Back
Cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, and NFT projects have enough elements to keep the users glued to them. Be it tokenized rewards, challenges, events, freebies, and volatility, there are enough incentives for the crypto group to stay glued to a project or its app. These rewards and incentives could be essential in building a crypto community if the group mods strategize and distribute them engagingly and fairly. The strongest and most purposeful crypto communities know how to distinguish between solid user engagement and value-driven content. They know how to bring users back daily to see what’s new, happening, and available. An intelligent crypto community manager may leverage these incentives and freebies for its audience to create engaging activities and content which may be exciting, educational, and rewarding in the form of events, quizzes, random surprises, live panels, AMA, or even in for specific feedback.
Give Them A Reason To Refer and Share
One of the critical elements of creating a community is asking the existing community members to shill the project or to their friends and other communities. And they would only do it if they are satisfied and find value in it. The crypto community is happy to hear about new projects; referrals can help create a large community. All a community manager has to do is create a digital marketing strategy that helps find an organic and comfortable method for their community to share their excitement and enthusiasm with others (in a way that they get rewarded) and ensure they have internal alignment before deploying.
Optimum Utilization of Community and Social Media-Driven Analytics
Be it a single telegram group, multiple discord communities, or any other platform, each interaction with the community over social media platforms throws a lot of analytics which are crucial in terms of feedback and could be a starting point in creating newer ideas. Community analytics provides immense knowledge and helps take a bird’s eye view. It's often easy to get lost in the weeds of a community and stay overly focused on specific discussions — so analytics take the team back from that and remind them how far they have come and how things currently are. Using analytics strategically could often be the key to new opportunities, which could help the project pivot or find a new course for growth.
Show the Leadership
Most people love cryptocurrency and decentralized Finance because it creates a newer version of the financial world with transparency in leadership and top-down decision-making. The blockchain community always appreciates a cryptocurrency community manager who is hardworking, positive-minded, and shows every quality of a thought leader, thus bridging the gap between the community and the management or founding team. New and existing members appreciate the positive tone when there is clear, visible accountability within the organization and consider it critical for the long-term success of the blockchain project.
Finally, Establish Trust And Safety
While it is important to engage with the community, the community manager and mods have to make sure that the communication is clear, and each of their strategies shouldn't look like it's been overdone or something that would make the community feel that it's a scam. Effective communication and transparency could help establish trust and assure the safety of the users from being scammed and helping the community move in the right direction
This also includes that the community manager must be vigilant and protect the community from scammers. All they have to do is actively search among their users for usernames like Support and Helpdesk and ban them as they scan through their telegram channel and try to find scam victims.
A trustworthy project and a vast community are often levers to attract investors and could help raise early-stage capital for the business. Also, an active community that includes professionals from various domains and is built on trust could attract members who could assist in some critical aspects of the project by providing suggestions, feedback, or even partnering with projects to provide the required services. But creating a trust bridge between the team and its community members would take time and require umpteen patience. This could be the most critical skill or quality the community manager must possess and excel in.
To conclude, having a solid and loyal community is extremely necessary for a project. It’s great to see so many people, whether they are crypto folks or not, wanting to get involved in investing, trading, and being part of crypto businesses and projects. But with this level of growth comes the need for a very focused crypto community management strategy which might not be insanely difficult but needs patience, consistency, and commitment. And, as the space grows, community management would be a pivotal asset to build the project's brand loyalty and show the people who matter most to the project's success a human side to your brand that they can relate to.
Your blog is like a cup of hot cocoa on a chilly day—comforting and delightful. I appreciate the warmth and coziness your writing exudes. Thank you for creating a welcoming space.
I’m grateful for stumbling upon your blog. Your posts are always well-researched and thought-provoking. I look forward to every new article you publish.