Blockchain: Best Practices for marketing to the West (America)
Traveling personally to Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, and China this year, one thing I’ve learned as an American is that business and communication is handled, well, differently overseas.
By Lawrence Digital — LawrenceLabs.co
Recently while in China, many companies were asking more about how to effectively reach and market to western audiences, and I don’t blame them, for not knowing. In fact, the disconnect between the east and west, even in the internet age, is quite stark. I recently wrote a short piece on just this.
But after meeting with over 50 projects in Asia, I was able to sit down with one, and they nicely summarized what their questions were, as stated below.
I will do my best to answer them, and as a founder at the Marketing Incubator LawrenceLabs.co, I’d be happy to see any project gain some information and insights from these answers.
Without further ado, here are the questions, condensed:
1. What are the different user portraits for Twitter, Facebook, Medium, Reddit, Instagram, and Youtube? If we want to start a marketing campaign, which channels would be recommended to start promotion?
2. What content/topic (s) in the West might motivate people the most for their willingness to talk about the blockchain project under their own social media accounts? Do we have a ratio graph of possible factors such as interest, value proposition, rewards, and popularity?
Let’s Start with Number 1 First
- This is a great question. I know the social platforms in China are completely different from the ones listed above, although the rest still have popularity outside of China, it is important to understand which platforms are important.
I’ll start in the order listed.
Twitter: Twitter is the fastest and most effective way to get news to your audience. The # hashtag function is the quickest way to have your content go “viral”, and be seen by the most amount of people. By using a popular tag like #crypto, your content can be shown on other’s feeds without them following you — VERY important.
Twitter is also where most of America’s KOL’s and Influencers hang out. It is a fast moving platform, and truly the only platform that can keep up with the speed of Crypto. An effective Tweet on Twitter can garner 100,000 impressions within 4 hours.
After impressions, the next big step is building trust. You build trust by communicating. This is very important. Many Westerners feel that projects from the East do not make any attempt to communicate, and from there they just don’t care about their customers, which might not be true, but it ruins the chance to build loyalty. The best way to build trust is to actually answer DMs, and respond to comments. I have seen the inbox of some top Crypto projects, and 1000s of unanswered DMs don’t fare well.
Long story short, Twitter is the proverbial water cooler for crypto. If you’re not showing up and adding good conversations, people won’t like you. So please talk to your community! If you want more on this mindset, read Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk, it breaks down the mindset perfectly. People want to feel like their friends with the founders. Westerners don’t like the idea of unreachability, we like to feel like we’re buddies with the CEO, even if we’re not.
Facebook: Well Facebook, is losing in popularity amongst the youth of America.
Facebook does still have a large platform, and if you are truly interested in building a complete and well-trusted project, which in turns brings more investors, and community members you should have a Facebook page and Facebook group.
The Facebook page should be used to publish long-form articles about the projects, while also sharing visual media, such as photos and videos. The audience for Facebook is normally a completely different segment from Twitter, so you have the chance to grow your community outside of the realms of Twitter. Typically an older audience.
It’s harder to go viral on Facebook, so I’d recommend running Facebook Paid Ads to target your community, and it’s not hard to reach a few thousand people for a few hundred US Dollars. The areas of Paid Facebook Advertising is something that isn’t too hard, but you need to be trained on the proper advertising channels, so you don’t waste money with no traction or views. Something LawrenceLabs is an expert at, so feel free to contact us with any questions. The other great thing about Facebook Ads is that they reach Instagram as well, which is actually awesome, and something I’ll get into more.
Medium: Medium is a great tool, and I would think of it as great food in a restaurant, in the middle of nowhere. Meaning, everyone loves it, but to get there you’re going to need transportation.
In America, those transportation tools are mostly Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit, while Instagram and Youtube and can drive traffic to Medium, they’re not as relevant because those are video platforms, and most of its users prefer video content.
Medium is a place to build trust, and provide lengthy overviews about your project and important updates. This level of unbridled communication will truly get the sophisticated investors you want in your community to believe more in your project.
Having an active Medium account, and using other channels to promote those articles is Highly recommended.
Reddit: Reddit is very important in crypto in America. Although the barrier to entry is very high, and you have to commit to a drawn-out process to gain trust and build a community.
Reddit doesn’t let new users create threads automatically, so you have to create an account, and lurk in current threads and make smart comments, in the hope that someone upvotes you. After you receive typically 25 to 50 upvotes, which could take anywhere from a week to a month, depending on how long you work on it, you will be allowed to create a thread.
What’s highly recommended is creating your own “Channel” for example Reddit.com/r/yourcryptocompany, instead of posting articles under the main channel of r/crypto. This allows you to funnel your community all into one place, while also moderating the comments.
Reddit is a lot like medium, in since you will have to drive traffic from external platforms, but unlike Medium, Reddit can go “Viral” a lot quicker. In the sense, that if you have a great product update on your Sub-Reddit “Your Crypto Company” a famous Redditor will repost it on the main Reddit Channel “Crypto” which has over 1M readers A day.
So yes, Reddit should be part of your overall community strategy.
Instagram: Instagram is great and visual, so make sure your content is pretty. Needs great colors, fonts, and images. You can also use # hashtags on Instagram, but it doesn’t have nearly the same viral factor as Twitter. Because, on Twitter, a big account with 20K followers can repost your post, can share it with their followers, which you can’t do on Instagram.
But, one way you can really show off your company to western audiences in a way that’s never been done, is using the “story” feature. You can upload 20-second personal videos from the team or just fun things at the office, people love that.
The more personal the better. The more you can show you’re a real company with real employees, the higher the return on trust from the western crypto community and trust me, the return will be exponential.
Lastly Youtube: Youtube is Great, and I would say it’s up there with Twitter and Reddit. Those are the big three. YouTube is dominated by KOLs and very few if any projects in the east make videos, but if they did, wow that would go so far with the west. Like I said before, Americans want to feel connected, like we’re friends with the team.
I think that’s why CZ and Justin Sun are so well known in the west, and their communities are so big, it’s because they’re always sharing — everything. Videos, live streams, interviews, and responding to comments and retweeting their communities work.
Lastly, and it wasn’t asked but, Telegram. Telegram is very important. Make sure to have a good moderator in your community chat. Telegram is one of the best ways to communicate directly with your fans, have the CEO drop in for 20 minutes a week to answer questions and your community will love you for it. The best thing about Telegram is you can share all of your other company’s content directly into the chat.
So in conclusion, the big three are Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube, which should be supplemented with Medium, Facebook, and Instagram. If resources are limited, I would focus on Twitter, Youtube, and Telegram, Reddit first.
2. What content/topic (s) in the West might motivate people the most for their willingness to talk about the blockchain project under their own social media accounts? Do we have a ratio graph of possible factors such as interest, value proposition, rewards, and popularity?
What motivates people in the west to share a blockchain project? Well, when it’s their favorite project, they’ll be happy to share it, in fact, they’ll become your best marketer.
How do you convince them to love your project?
Have great technology, and be able to explain why its better than everything else.
Explain what problem you are solving, and the magnitude of it. Clear Value Proposition. People in the west are not short on imagination? if you paint a story that this project is just getting started, and there is a ton of upside in terms of tech developments, or partnerships, westerners will understand, and refer their friends to a great project with upsides.
The Last thing is to be nice and communicative.
As I’m writing this a top 25 project hasn't responded to a single comment on their Twitter feed in a week, and trust me the whole crypto community in America has noticed.
What that means is, whatever the next project is, that offers the same tech and solutions, but has better customer support, will get their interest, and just think, that could be your project they’re going towards :)
About the Author: Digital Lawrence, is an award wining content creator and blockchain advocate, he is also the cofounder at the Blockchain Growth Incubator Lawrence Labs.
If you have any further questions please feel free to contact him at LawrenceLabs.co or follow him on Twitter at Digital Lawrence
