Tips And Tricks To Build Your NFT Community

In the previous chapter Best practices to launch your NFT project, we discussed a few social media platforms where you can establish your NFT community.

In this chapter, we will discuss tips and tricks for each site and ways to ensure your supporters have a well-organized location to assemble and learn about your project. 

Where to Start Your Community 

While almost every major social media platform has a crypto and NFT community at this point, there are a few where a vast majority of investors and artists congregate: Discord, Reddit and Twitter. While Linkedin, Deviantart, and Meta also have decent-sized communities, they are a bit more regional and will not have as wide of a reach.

When starting to build your social media presence, it’s important not to over-extend yourself too quickly. Identifying 1-2 websites that best suit your immediate needs will allow you to focus on other aspects of your project. By focusing your attention on a smaller number of accounts and growing your following, it will be easier to expand outward in the future. Below, we will provide a summary of each platform along with the pros and cons so you can judge which you would like to utilize for your project.  

Discord

Currently hosts over 100 million users. Discord is a platform that has gone from the ultimate gamer hangout to a service that hosts everything from tech support for companies to fandom-based RP servers. Discord is one of the more customizable platforms available and offers a paid version called Nitro and ‘boosts’ that allows access to more content that the free version does not have. While it is possible to use the unpaid version and still maintain a decent-sized community, there are serious advantages to having a fully boosted community, including animated server icons, larger file uploads, and customized invite links. Boosting to the highest level yourself will net you around $489 a year. 

There are plenty of free features available to use, including user roles which allow you to grant users access to locked channels, identify certain groups of your followers, or even change the color of individual’s names.

The platform also includes access to stage channels, which are voice-only channels that allow you to host meetings, seminars, or live updates where you control who can speak. Additionally, while most social media platforms allow you to advertise your page to the general public, Discord’s server promotion is locked behind a paywall. Not only that, but your account must meet certain criteria for your community for them to recommend it on their platform.

So, it will be important to have a secondary platform like Twitter or Reddit to get new members to your Discord. 

• Pros
  • Easy to connect with and get feedback from your supporters directly
  • Ability to communicate using audio, video, and text
  • Customizable content like emojis, stickers, and personalized roles
  • Bots designed to help with moderation, automation, and security
  • Users can show support for your server by gifting boosts, and nitro
  • Discord stages allow for easy communication between you and your supporters

• Cons 
  • Not all features are free
  • Bots and spam accounts are pretty common 
  • Hard to maintain large communities on your own, you will most likely need to bring on moderators 
  • Has become a vector of attack for hackers
  • Limited on-site advertisement available, so a secondary account is necessary

Reddit 

Reddit has the smallest user base at ‘only’ 52 million active users on an average day. That being said, it has some of the largest NFT communities where you can reach like-minded individuals. With pages like r/NFT (549k members) and r/NFTsMarketplace (267k members) allowing users to crosspost advertisements and announcements, it makes it easy for you to get your project in front of those who are the most likely to support it. Reddit also has built-in features Karma and awards, which is a way for other users to endorse your page, posts, and comments. You can design your own awards and grant them to your biggest supporters!

There is a downside to using Reddit. The platform has a steep learning curve for new users. Individuals who have never used the platform before might struggle initially to get a hang of all of the features. Once you do get the hang of things, you’ll have the ability to fully customize your page and utilize built-in moderation features. Like Discord, hiring a moderation team once your page starts to take off is highly recommended to keep spam accounts and misbehaving users off your page. 

• Pros 
  • Access to large existing communities to advertise your project
  • Fully customizable landing page and content
  • Built-in supportive NFT community 
  • Reddit AMAs (ask me anything) 
  • Built-in polling feature and varying post types
  • All features are free to use
  • Allows for more anonymity than other platforms
  • HTML coding allows for additional page features for tech-savvy users
  • Offers sponsored ad buys 
  • Secure platform 

• Cons
  • Learning curve for inexperienced users
  • No voice or video chat options
  • Lots of content makes it difficult to stand out above competitors 
  • While there is a built-in moderator, Reddit itself is unregulated 
  • Reddit requires more time than other platforms 

Twitter

Twitter boasts an impressive 237.8 million active users, which makes it significantly larger than either of the platforms previously mentioned. With such an expansive user base, it makes sense that there is a significant community of NFT investors already on the platform.

Twitter’s search feature, which uses hashtags to organize and target audiences, makes it easy to reach those who are following those topics. The site’s algorithms also help to direct content to users that they believe they will enjoy. It is also possible to buy ads that utilize Twitter’s knowledge of its users to get your content in front of new users you might not otherwise be able to reach. The site also includes a built-in chat feature, as well as the ability to go live and host a video or audio stream.

Out of all previous examples, Twitter offers the most streamlined user experience. Unfortunately, the ease of access comes at the cost of customization. Excluding editing your profile image and banner, there aren’t many ways to change the appearance of your profile.

Character and file size limits are also something to keep in mind when getting started on the platform. Videos must be limited to 140 seconds and text posts need to stay under 280 characters. This lack of customization extends out to bots as well, and in order to get a lot of the automation the other sites offer you may have to make accounts with third-party customer relationship management (CRM) software including Hootsuite or HubSpot to accomplish the same results. 

• Pros
  • Streamlined user experience makes it easy to use
  • Large NFT audiences
  • Hashtags and easy trend monitoring systems
  • Secure platform with active post monitoring for bot and spam accounts
  • 3rd party CRM program compatibility 
  • Live video and audio events 
  • Access to relevant breaking news 

• Cons
  • Limited customization 
  • Small post size and character limits 
  • Over-saturation of related content make it hard to stand out 
  • No ability to assign moderators to a page means you must share account login 

How to Grow Your Social Media Presence 

Once you establish which platforms you will be utilizing, it’s time to start taking steps to optimize your social media strategy. Whether you chose one of the previously listed sites or not, the core components remain the same. 

Create a Style Guide

Before you send your first tweet, invite your first Discord member or comment on your first Reddit post, you need to establish your brand identity. Creating a style guide will ensure that you always use brand-consistent colors, fonts, and logos no matter who is creating posts for your account. Having all your information condensed into a style guide will also make your life a lot easier when you hire social media managers or graphic designers.

It will also make sure you aren’t trying to remember what shade of purple you used when first making your logo. Document your exact color codes and identify a few complimentary colors that you can use for text and graphics. You don’t need to be an art major to create eye-catching cohesive brand content.  Cohesive branding across your platforms will help you stand out from other projects and make your project seem more official and trustworthy. 

Follow Related Pages and Creators

Getting yourself noticed by a website’s algorithm is more than just what posts you create. Following popular pages related to NFTs helps to categorize your account, and will do wonders to direct people to your page. As a small account, it can be difficult to initially break through the crowd, so providing yourself every opportunity to get noticed is critical. An extra incentive to follow accounts is the potential for a follow-back, which can help grow your numbers initially. 

Bonus Tip: Be courteous. Don’t advertise your project in someone else’s comment section unless you have express permission. This is a quick way to get yourself labeled as a spam account and blacklisted by fellow artists.

Optimize Your Posts 

Walls of text can be daunting, especially on social media. Whether you are posting a community update or a link to an article written about your project, make sure you get the point of the post across in the first couple of sentences. Providing brief summaries with links to longer posts like newsletters and articles will keep you from getting TL;DR (too long, didn’t read) comments. 

Identify The Best Time To Post

In the previous chapter, we discussed that identifying your target audience is one of the most important steps you can take to ensure your brand’s sustainability. It will also help you to identify the best times for you to put out crucial announcements. If your target audience is in Japan, you want to make sure your post is up during peak traffic hours in Tokyo, not New York. 

Keep in mind that in addition to regional differences, each website has different peak posting times in each region. For example, Hootsuite’s research on Twitter has identified that 8 am on Monday and Tuesday in your targeted region is the time with the highest site traffic.  

Post Regularly, But Don’t Spam

Keeping up a consistent presence online might seem daunting at first, but establishing a regular schedule will do wonders in keeping your audience’s attention. Of course, you don’t always have to keep to a set schedule. Deviations can be expected and you might have days where you will post more or less than usual. When initially building your page it might feel like you should post as much as possible to draw attention, but resist this urge! Releasing one or two well-thought-out posts a day is often more than sufficient. Posting too much can annoy subscribers, and you want to make sure people can find relevant information about your project on your page as easily as possible. 

Engage With Your Supporters

While eventually, your goal is to get to a point where you are getting far too many comments, mentions, and messages to respond to them all, but when you’re first starting out you should do your best to respond to any question or comment that you receive. Engaging with your audience will help build a sense of community. If you are building your community on Discord, do your best to greet new arrivals and engage with conversations being held on your channels. You might feel a bit awkward at first, but once you start practicing you’ll feel far more comfortable! As your community grows, bring on moderators to help you keep up your presence in the community, but remember that ultimately your investors want to hear from you more than anyone!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.