How to create and grow a crypto community: a guide

Introduction

Today’s users value not just products themselves but also the values that each company broadcasts. Customers share their experiences, follow project news, and tell their friends and families about their favorite products. They act as brand advocates. 

People like sharing their opinions, and it’s up to a business to support this desire to communicate by providing a convenient community space. 

Many understand the value of a loyal and engaged crypto community, but few manage to build one around their product. How to build a crypto community that thrives and helps promote your startup?

Goals and objectives

The first step is to make sure that your project needs a community. 

• Does the product positioning require a community?
• Does the target audience expect to interact with the project through a community?
• Can your value proposition be broadcast through social media?

If a community does indeed seem like a good fit for your project, next you should decide the goals for creating one. Some startups need to show the potential investors that a lot of people are following their project; others use communities for lead generation; and some want a way to gather and process feedback. 

In any case, you need to have a clear answer to the question: why does your project need a community?

Analytics

Let’s say you’ve concluded that a community is necessary. The next steps are an internal audit and an external analysis. 

An audit will help you understand if the project is ready for launching a community. You’ll need to analyze the website, including naming, visuals, texts and creative content, tone of voice, etc.: all these elements need to fit with the chosen positioning and not contradict each other. Also, study all the content about the project published in the media, by influencers, and in other outlets, and make sure that the content doesn’t conflict with your value proposition. 

Next, look at the market as a whole to check which tools are used by your competitors; how the target audience behaves in the top crypto communities; and what the current trends of community development are. 

This type of external analysis will allow you to calculate the average crypto currency community size for your market and users’ engagement. Note what sort of content is published in such communities and how rival community managers interact with the audience. 

A quality analysis will also help you establish benchmarks for the community size and activity, as well as reveal what sort of content your target audience does and does not like. 

For an even deeper analysis, we recommend a focus group survey. The answers can serve as a base for more precise marketing strategy hypotheses:

• A quantitative survey of general crypto users (Yes/No answers);
• A qualitative interview with target market representatives (expert answers).

Strategy

As you are moving through the preparatory stage, you can also work on a strategy. Here’s what to keep in mind.

A strategy should target both short-term and long-term goals and have an action plan and a timeline.

Selecting a platform

Where are you going to build your crypto community: Discord, Telegram, or perhaps in Reddit? The choice of a platform depends on the product: Discord is a good fit for GameFi, while for an NFT collection, you can also use Twitter and Instagram. Don’t try to cover all social networks at once; think of how much traffic you plan to attract. If it’s a lot, then split the traffic between 2 or 3 channels, but if your traffic target is limited, focus on one platform at first. 

Creative concept

Before launching a live crypto community project, you need to prepare the content: templates for visuals, tone of voice, brand style, references, and a moodboard. These items will become a handbook for the community manager. 

Content plan

You’ll find it easier to work with content and publish on schedule if you first prepare a plan with the key topics and posting frequency. The topics can range from the startups and its news, the product, educational content (centered on the product or the industry), and interactive posts. 

Here’s a sample content plan:

Engagement mechanics

Apart from the content topics, you need to think of engagement tools that will keep the community active, create hype before important updates, and motivate the users to perform the desired action. 

Examples of engagement mechanics 

1. Project quiz: 3 to 5 multiple choice questions;

2. Last comment/message: the user whose comment survives a set amount of time as the last in the thread gets a prize;

3. Write a post about the product, tagging 3 friends and the project;

4. Meme contest: create a meme and share it in the community.

Once all this is done, you’re almost ready to launch a community. The last remaining step is to provide guidelines for the future community manager. This is especially important if you’re hiring someone who only has experience moderating chats and need to teach them how to become a crypto community manager in the full sense.

What is a crypto community manager’s job description? You’ll be surprised to find out how many items are on the list.

Community manager: key responsibilities 

1. Use additional social media accounts to stimulate activity in the early stages and during quiet periods. This helps to create an impression of a lively community and engage other users.
2. Welcome new users with a relevant question (how they found out about the project, what they expect from it, etc.); directing them to the most interesting posts and news, asking about their experience using the product.
3. Weekly work with social media accounts: updating account descriptions, avatars, and pinned posts, setting up and adjusting plugins and bots if necessary.
4. Daily surveys and discussions (once a day): market trends, project expectations, updates etc.
5. Shilling. The crypto community manager needs to post native positive messages about the project in relevant communities.
6. Spreading positive vibes and working with concerns and negativity.
7. Answering user questions and replying to messages within 10 minutes.
8. Encouraging users to create memes: once a week, the community manager can customize a popular meme to match the project, post it, and ask users to share their own memes.
9. Praise and follow the most active user of the week and month.
10. Share links to influencer and media content about the project.
11. Reaction management:  when posting a link to an influencer post/video, the manager should ask the community to interact with it (like, repost, subscribe, comment), explaining how this can help the project. Interactions with the project’s own posts should be encouraged the same way.
12. Encouraging discussions around the project’s niche: the manager should monitor industry news and repost the most interesting articles in the community, commenting on how this can help or be important to the project (on a weekly basis).
13. Tracking and sharing important project-related stats and numbers.
14. Local chats: once there are at least 500 users that could be formed into a regional community (by language), it’s a good idea to create such a community.

Reporting

A community manager in crypto should also provide the project team with a daily  report on the following: 

• Community mood
• Current discussion topics
• Instights
• Blocks/bans
• New users
• Growth dynamics
• User questions for the FAQ

New questions posted by users should be gathered in a spreadsheet and added to the project FAQ.

KPI tracking

Apart from the guidelines, you should also establish KPIs to evaluate the community manager’s performance. While different metrics can be used, we recommend focusing on these:

• Average response time and frequency
• Working with negativity and bans
• Fighting spam and shillers/scammers
• Daily interactions
• Engagement optimization (using additional accounts to keep the community active)
• Spreading project news outside of the community.

The list is far from exhaustive, but without tracking these metrics you won’t be able to evaluate the manager’s work objectively.

Syncing community management and marketing

Once you’re done with the analysis and documentation for the community manager, you can finally launch your community:

• Create and customize the profiles;
• Publish a few introductory posts;
• Pin a FAQ and a few useful links;
• Activate the community manager.

Once the community page or channel has some content and the moderator is ready, introduce other marketing channels to attract target traffic. 

The average size of an early-stage crypto community is 5,000 members on Discord, 10,000 for a Telegram crypto community, and 15,000 on Twitter. Therefore, we recommend getting 70% of your starter audience from cheaper sources (for qantity) and 30% from more expensive channels (for activity). 

We also suggest using Twitter to find, select, and collaborate with the influencers who will channel their followers to your new community with promo tweets. You’ll need to provide a link to the community. 

It’s better to attract users in several stages with 3 to 6 week breaks, so that audience outflow coincides with the inflow of new followers. 

Select several bloggers for each campaign and distribute the budget between influencers of various price levels and audience size. This is better that spending everything on a single expensive influencer, since their audience can turn out not to match your target — and because a huge audience can include a lot of fake followers (something you should avoid).

Reasons to scale a community

You have a good-sized community; the community manager maintains a good level of activity through interesting content and engagement mechanics; and the product has captured the users’ interest thanks to its interesting features and roadmap.

Timely reports and community analysis can  help choose the best crypto community expansion tactic. This doesn’t have to be scaling up — there are a few options:

1. Expanding to a new GEO (creating local chats in different languages);
2. Reanimating the current community (in case of low activity and strong outflow);
3. Starting a new community for a new product (so-called horizontal growth, which can mean starting a community when the company enters a new niche). 

Community development steps in all these cases will be the same as what we described: you’ll need to go through the whole process starting from preparatory anaysis and ending with attracting traffic or launching/relaunching the community.

The metrics to watch when developing a community

As your community evolves, quantitative metrics aren’t the first things to watch out for — even though they can show you the growth and activity dynamics. Instead, give priority to working with user feedback. 

Every month, obtain feedback from the community manager to learn these things about the users:

• experience interacting with the product; 
• expectations from the project and ideas for development;
• pain points;
• what sort of content they are interested in.

Moreover, you shoud analyze the content of the posts and the quality of crypto community management to understand how satisfied the users are with the current format. 

By gathering up-to-date data every month, you’ll be able to identify user needs and implement them in the next period. 

Conclusion

Successful crypto community building involves a lot of steps, each of which seems easy when taken by itself. But failing any of this steps can mean losing to your competitors and ending up with a community that is nothing more than a number. 

It’s important to leverage the latest trends and listen to your users. This way you can create a community that matches their expectations and has the competitive advantages that will keep the audience interested in your product.