@golubevGolubev_Od_UA
Crynet.io (project manager), EU structural funds, ICO/STO/IEO, NGO & venture, marketing projects
It would seem that everything is obvious and understandable. We use social networks every day and know how they work. In addition, it seems that it will be easy for the project to tell about its product there. No matter how it is! But in fact, social networks are the most tricky and unstable channels.
The first step when promoting a project is to make a list of all social media platforms, where you are sure to find out your followers and investors by topic and audience. It is necessary to subtly feel and understand exactly where your project on the network will be appropriate and interesting, how you will deliver information there and promote banner advertising.
It is worth very carefully weighing all the pros and cons of channels such as Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, LinkedIn, Medium, sharpened for visual content, for graphic or text. Indeed, for a product from the FinTech or blockchain category, a beautiful picture is secondary.
As such, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, and Reddit are worth shortlisting. As for Facebook, the policy towards blockchain and crypto projects is not quite stable there, and at any moment, your advertising campaign or page may be banned as well.
The first three social networks are almost obvious – they can be used to reach a wide variety of audiences. On Facebook and Twitter, informal communication is encouraged, while the professional network LinkedIn paves the way for a seductive world of investors, crypto evangelists, and specialists from the blockchain and crypto industry. Quora, judging by the bulk of articles on promoting crypto projects, is a must-have channel.
It is also obvious that any crypto startup or product must have its own Reddit account. Let me remind you that in the second half of 2018, Google Corporation, followed by Facebook and Twitter, banned any advertising related to cryptocurrencies. Despite this, you can see ads for crypto projects on these networks.
Twitter is quite a specific network, where the emphasis is on short text messages. The Twitter audience is always active in comments, retweets, and reposts to their other accounts on other social networks. The main task is to increase organically the number of your followers and subscribers. So start experimenting with different strategies:
• increasing the number of subscribers
• audience search via Twitter Ads
• and involving the community in the discussion of the project
Buying followers is a common way to try, but it won’t give you a lively effect. For a relatively low price for such a service, you will receive a large influx of users, but you will be guaranteed to have zero conversion. This situation is especially inconvenient for projects where there is a working product – an application (mobile or desktop).
Twitter does not help in the task of attracting users. Finally, if you have $1000 free, you can experiment with different Twitter campaigns to reach a more correct and responsive audience.
But if your task is to get a large number of followers, we advise you not to spend money on Twitter Ads (with a CPC of $ 0.69), we guarantee you that Airdrop will attract people to your account for almost free and many times more.
As you know, Facebook has banned direct advertising of crypto projects on its site. But it is known that there are ways to get around this ban, but only with the help of an authorized advertising agency or after your token appears on the exchanges (if the exchanges themselves are verified and have licenses that Facebook understands).
You can try to play around with wording and ‘’Call to Action’’ phrases, but 100% of your ads will be rejected by Facebook moderators. The help of a specialized agency to get around such bans costs from $5000. Again, your Facebook followers can come in the form of organic traffic through an Airdrop / Bounty campaign as well.
As for LinkedIn. It offers several options for placing ads on its site (they call it “self-hosted targeted ads”). You can try each of these options (with an average CPC of $ 11.8), but, unfortunately, again, no one can guarantee the result. On the social network LinkedIn, the best behavior strategy for you is likely to be to address specific people.
Yes, this is meticulous work that takes time, but it is mainly effective, for which this network is appreciated.
With Quora ads, you can get multiple installs in total, for $ 0.79 each. Your strategy should be to find relevant topics on the platform (about mobile payments, cryptocurrency, blockchain, money transfers, and so on) and answer questions from there.
In this network, you must work carefully, without aggressive marketing in your responses. Thus, this network will allow your project to bring a certain number of people to the app or project. Finally, Quora is a good guerrilla marketing tool, but it is time-consuming and not as efficient in terms of install conversions.
Reddit – In our opinion, this is a little bit strange platform. There may be a large crypto community of fanatics on Reddit, but the way Reddit works is convoluted and too complex. There are many restrictions for accounts with low karma, but in order to raise your karma, you need to comply with many requirements, sometimes idiotic, in our opinion.
The effect of increasing karma on Reddit will be more PR – your account will look cool, but whether it will lead to an increase in followers is a big question.
In general, before any start-up, and even a crypto start-up, there are two tasks: to form knowledge about the project and to attract the interest of investors. In the first case, you need to break through the competitors, in the second, you need to prove that the startup is promising, and the founders are honest people, not scammers.
Such a volume of marketing work cannot be done in a week. Therefore, it takes several months or more to prepare a crypto project for promotion. During this time, the startup team must declare itself, prove its worth and collect a minimum loyal audience.
Marketing and PR have a direct impact on attracting investors and successfully raising the necessary funds. Practice shows that in most cases the failure to receive investment is associated not only with technical flaws, but often with weak interaction with your audience and with the wrong choice of channels for PR and promotion, and savings on the advertising budget as well.
Placing information about the project on thematic sites is an obligatory part of the promotion campaign. It is necessary to select forums dedicated to the blockchain. This is easy to do.
One of the largest blockchain forums is Bitcointalk. In it, you will definitely receive the first questions and feedback about your project. And as a marketing channel, this forum is still effective. Also among the still free social media promotion tools are:
• Creation of thematic groups and attraction of users to them. You can create several groups for free and invite friends and like-minded people to them. If you regularly publish interesting information, then people will follow you. The promotion of your group will grow exponentially.
• Mutual subscriptions, likes, and follows. There are many users in social networks with fake accounts who are ready to give you likes, tweets and so on. And you will mutually have to like them as well. But you need to understand that this should be done only at first, in order to create the appearance of a promoted page or group. This is not the target audience, if you stop following each other, they will disappear.
• Search and participate in competitive groups and communities. If you find groups of your topic, on which there is a live audience, you can take part in its life, while periodically referring to your page or group in comments and discussions.
From the outside, it can be seen that this is a voluminous work, which takes a very long time, so such services can also be bought from advertising agencies. Creating a topic on specialized forums helps to establish contact with the audience, potential investors, and so on. Administering the topic on the forum provides direct interaction with the audience: it allows you to answer questions, talk in more detail about various aspects of the project, and immediately dispel all doubts.
However, don’t expect all feedback to be positive: critical feedback is just as important as it helps improve your project. You can carry out similar forum work on telegram by creating a public project group. You need to create threads about the upcoming fundraising campaign immediately after launching the project website. Of course, it is necessary to provide round-the-clock monitoring of comments and timely answer all questions in AMA (ask me anything) manner.
While social media and community platforms seem to be interchangeable, there is actually a clear distinction between them. Social networks, as a rule, consist of users who have nothing in common (only the very fact of using the platform, since their friends are on it). Communities revolve around a specific topic. You can attract certain users from the social network to this platform and thus form a community focused on your project.
Most start-up companies are forced to survive in conditions of extremely limited resources, the most important of which is time – in order not to die, a business needs to find the right development model as soon as possible, start attracting real customers and make money.
Moreover, most often, Facebook pages and Twitter accounts appear not because the team has a real idea of how it can help in business, but because everyone does it – and this is the first mistake!!! Social media needs to be able be comfortable to use – and it’s not fast going things.
Even if the business of a certain project implies the possibility of getting real benefits from working with social networks, it will take a lot of time and effort to achieve good results.
To get the maximum coverage on social networks, simply publishing interesting content will no longer work – you will need to resort to buying ads in one way or another. And here you just need to understand the profile of each resources that give great returns.
The creators of new projects need to decide what goals of promoting of the project are and take the time to create interesting and useful content, which can then be published on thematic resources as well. This approach helps to attract a truly loyal audience that is interested in the expertise of the brand and its products after reading the article, and not people who spontaneously clicked like after they met a funny picture from the company’s designer in the newsfeed.
Dialogue with these users is very beneficial for the business, as it will help improve the product and achieve real improvement in business results. If the startup team cannot create an article that tells about some real and useful experience, then maintaining accounts on social networks will do nothing for the business, since the accounts will have to be filled with third-party content that the audience can see in dozens of other places.
It will be extremely difficult to get people interested in this way. And here comes the next topic closely related to SMM – content creation, that we will consider further.
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Sergey Golubev (Сергей Голубев)
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