Engaging With Your NFT Community
A thriving NFT community is not something that is built overnight. Being able to communicate effectively and engage with your community on a consistent basis with what matters most to them can set you up for long term success. This can turn members into community advocates. In this post, I will guide you through some of the major elements that I see contribute to the engagement and longevity of a community.
How to Communicate
When you jump around different NFT projects’ Twitter profiles and Discord servers, you’ll notice that each project has its own communication style. This style is formed over time by the people acting as the voice of the project, the tone and cadence of their communication, and the frequency in which they communicate. In most cases, having a consistent approach to communication helps a project’s success. Below are some recommendations of how to approach your community communication strategy.
Team
As you grow your community, it is important that your audience knows who the voice/voices of the project are. Rather than all team members having an active role in community engagement, posting and communication, assign specific team members who will be actively communicating to your audience. These members, if active, will begin to be viewed as the spokespeople for the brand by the community, and should be ready to take on those responsibilities. In some cases, project leads might want to be the day-to-day communication lead, but in others they may want to work more behind the scenes and only be front-facing for major announcements.
Frequency
Although many projects would like to constantly be engaging with their audience, the reality is that there are only so many hours in the day. Given this, it’s best to schedule your engagements and maintain a consistent frequency with your posting to ensure that your audience knows roughly when they can expect to hear from you. Even if your communication is less frequent than you’d like it to be, going radio silent after a consistent stream of engagement is a surefire way to get your community asking questions about the project.
Tone
Although not a necessity, it’s worthwhile sticking to a particular tone in your messaging. Your tone can influence how a community communicates on Twitter and Discord, both with other community members and with your team. If you’re an established organization who has a longstanding reputation to uphold, it may be best to keep your communications inline with how you’ve historically communicated with your audience. On the other hand, if you’re a new project who’s wanting to take a casual approach to communication, then it might make sense for your engagements to reflect that tone.
What to Communicate
Once you’ve established who’s communicating and how often, it’s good to plan for what content you’ll share with your community. Updates, reminders and personal interactions all play a part in keeping the community engaged and show your commitment to making good on their investment. Here are some thought-starters for what to engage your audience with.
Project Updates
As you move through your NFT roadmap, your community members will want to know what lies ahead of them. It is key to communicate any pertinent project updates to your community. These communications could include:
- Ensuring that you’re keeping your audience informed about the vision and mission of the project, especially if you are planning any future changes that may impact that vision.
- Informing your community about the project roadmap. In many cases, your roadmap may change or get adapted as time passes, so it’s best to communicate these changes as early as possible to your audience.
- If you are developing partnerships or collaborations with other communities, communicate the added value this will provide to your NFT holders.
- Any changes in the team should be shared with your community. The more transparency you provide in terms of who’s working on the project, the better equipped your community is to make educated investment decisions.
- If you are planning a wallet address snapshot, be it for an airdrop, gated channel or otherwise, be sure to communicate this prior. Community members like to know when these events are going to happen, and it has the potential to spur secondary marketplace activity for those wanting to FOMO in.
- If you are hosting a competition of any sort, be sure to communicate this to your community. Depending on how often you host competitions, it can be appropriate to tag @everyone in these posts. If you host competitions on a regular basis, consider creating a channel specific to competitions and avoiding tagging @everyone unless it’s a major competition. Too many @everyone tags can be frustrating to Discord users.
- If you are choosing to use project funds to invest in other NFT collections, DAOs or causes, be sure to communicate this to your community. Given that the blockchain is transparent and immutable, people will be able to track the movement of funds. If you aren’t transparent about where you’re putting money, it can lower the confidence of your community.
Promotion
As your project expands, you may receive some industry press, promotion or media coverage. This is something worth celebrating as it solidifies your community’s trust that they made a wise investment decision by buying into your project. If you regularly get mentioned in the press, be tasteful about what you communicate and how frequently. Oversharing could come across as spammy. Also keep in mind the context and content of the press. Just because you get a mention doesn’t necessarily mean it will be beneficial for your brand building.
Events
Events are a brilliant way to simultaneously connect with and provide value to your community. Twitter Spaces and Discord Stages are accessible avenues for your audience to hear from you and your partners about what you are doing to impact the industry.
Twitter Spaces is a community voice chat service Twitter. These ephemeral, live audio conversations allow for open, authentic, and unfiltered discussions, and a new way to communicate with your community members and beyond. This is because it’s a public space and anyone on Twitter can join the conversation, giving you exposure to a large audience outside your community for increasing awareness. Alternatively, you can use Discord Stages to host events for your current Discord community.
We advise that your conversations should have a particular agenda each time rather than letting the audience completely steer the conversation. Some thought starters for topics include weekly updates, Ask Me Anything sessions where you listen and respond to your community, ‘get to know’ conversations with your team, and guest speaker chats including project partners and NFT-Twitter ‘celebrities’.
Reminders
Discord and Twitter can be a lot to handle for some people. Someone may be following thousands of accounts and be in hundreds of Discord servers, each with their own agendas and announcements. In other words, your message can easily get lost in the mix. It is therefore best to remind community members of events that are time sensitive in an appropriate manner. For example, if you are hosting a major event or taking a wallet snapshot for an airdrop, then consider sending a 24 hour reminder. On the other hand, if you are playing a Discord game like Gartic in an hour, it’s not necessary to alert your entire community.
Teasers
Teasers are a nice, simple way to keep your audience members engaged and the hype high. By giving community members a glimpse of what’s to come, you can help bolster their confidence in your project and create FOMO for those who are yet to join your community. Teasers can include unreleased artwork, behind the scenes footage, and anything that you feel would get your community excited about the project.
Safety Updates
Unfortunately, NFT collectors are prone to being scammed — especially ones that are just starting out in the ecosystem. With the nefarious activity that goes on across within the space, it’s always best to act as an authority on safety practices. Ensure that you have all of your primary drop communication under one announcements Discord channel and that you communicate the same information via Twitter. Communicate that there will be no other messages, tags or DMs from your team and to dismiss these as potentially fraudulent schemes.
Platform Specific Considerations
The rules of thumb above apply to both Twitter and Discord, but in some cases, there are platform nuances that should be considered when it comes to community communication. Below are some examples of ways to engage with your audience on both platforms.
Twitter Specific
- Use your community’s passion for your project as a way to create ‘nano-rewards’ for followers through liking, commenting on and retweeting their posts about your project. This said, do so in a way that doesn’t come across as spammy and engage with content that resonates with what you’re trying to build.
- In a similar vein, follow users who are highly engaged with your project. You could see this as being a step up from a like or a comment, as it can be perceived that you’re paying closer attention to them as a reward for their engagement.
- Participate in your audience’s own Twitter Spaces. If someone within the community is hosting a Twitter Space, a surprise drop-in from your team can bolster this users’ affinity. You don’t need to play a major role in the conversation to make their day and gain some additional followers.
Discord Specific
- When communicating major updates, use an Announcements channel to communicate. Announcements should be limited to information you want all community members to see. In other words, don’t spam this channel. It’s normal to tag @everyone in this channel for each post, but not a necessity.
- In the same vein, don’t use the @everyone tag on a regular basis. This is a surefire way to frustrate people which can lead to a drop-off in followership.
- Participate in conversations. Drop a ‘GM’ in the chat every morning. Spend a while engaging with your audience about things that interest them outside of your project. Building up a rapport through ongoing communication is key.
- If your community is small but growing, welcome new members. Introduce them to the server. Ask how they found the project. Fostering 1:1 relationships where possible helps build community members’ affinity.
- It’s worthwhile trying to drive hype within community conversations. This can be general commentary about what’s exciting you about the project, sneak peeks of what you’re building (which can potentially be deleted if you really want to tease the community). Be sure to not offer financial advice or overpromise on what you can deliver when doing so.
Conclusion
The above is simply a jumping off point for ideas on how you can communicate with your community. There’s a lot of unique opportunities that you can foster for community engagement, so get creative. Next time, we’ll look into the nuances of building an NFT project as a well-established brand.
Meta Mike leads Partner Success at GigLabs and has a passion for contributing to the education and enablement of the open metaverse. GigLabs is an Atlanta-based technology company that provides white labeled end-to-end API technology stack for brands to launch NFT storefronts and marketplaces. The company partners with brands, agencies and creators to provide easy-to-use tools for generating, minting, and selling NFTs that can be presented within fully customizable brand experiences.
