How to Grow a Crypto Twitter Following for Your Brand

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This week’s issue is sponsored by Blockworks

Last week, Blockworks’ daily newsletter added 528 subscribers in one day!

I’ve been in crypto marketing for awhile and I’ve never seen that kind of newsletter growth from a crypto media brand.

They’re opening up a few sponsorship opportunities in their newsletter and on their podcasts.

If your brand wants to reach high net-worth individuals and investors interested in digital assets, reach out to the Blockworks team today.

When you email them, tell them I sent you, they’ll take care of you.

One of the hardest things to do as a brand is to stand out on Twitter. Social media is driven by personalities and is increasingly transitioning to cater to individuals, rather than brands. 86% of people say authenticity is important when deciding what brands they like and support.

In an industry like crypto, where the default consumer position is skepticism, how do companies project authenticity?

This is one of the first questions I get asked about crypto marketing. With Twitter having such a heavy impact on our industry’s community, it’s the first place emerging brands look to get off the ground.

It's one thing to grow a Twitter audience with a personal anon account. It's another to be a growing crypto business. How do you use the best practices of one for the other?

There are a few companies in our space that have figured this out and proven Twitter’s ability to be a primary driver of customer acquisition. The dream of every marketer (and every marketer’s boss) is to develop a consistent, scalable, “free” acquisition channel. If you can successfully pull off an organic social strategy, you’ll be way ahead of your competition.

But how do you create a plan to reach this goal? There are some key questions to answer first.

What do you want out of it?

Every brand on Twitter is there with the goal of acquiring new customers (duh), but that’s not what I’m getting at here. Like any marketing activation, there will always be secondary, evergreen goals and KPIs. But when I’m launching a strategy, I also like to consider this question:

What do I want to learn?

One of the best and worst things about Twitter is how fleeting it is. If a tweet fails, almost no one will have seen it. If a tweet takes off, everyone will see it. Both of these realities are for better and for worse.

But when you do start tweeting, what is it that you want to learn about your audience? There are the obvious things like demographics, geography, and so on. But there is minutia here to discover that will help with future campaigns.

Some general examples of things I like to ask:

1. What kind of posts do my followers like most: data-based insights or bitcoin thirsty tweets?

2. What tweet format works best: straight sentences or styled with line breaks?

3. Do posts with or without emojis get more engagement?

Of course, what is “best” can also vary. Is the KPI Likes? Retweets? Overall engagements? Engagement rate? Website visits?

The list goes on, but it’s important to decide before you launch.

What does it mean to be engaging as a brand?

Well, every marketer will give you a slightly different answer to this question. If you ask Twitter, they’re going to give you some default, high-level tip like, “test different CTAs.” But that’s probably not going to be much help for coming off as an authentic speaker in our space.

You have to present the brand as engaging without ulterior motives.

Through that lens, the best way to authentically engage the community as a brand is to speak WITH your audience, not at them.

To put it more simply:

• Make sure the brand is talking about the things they’re talking about

• Make sure the brand is shares the concerns they’re concerned about

• Make sure the brand is reflecting the values they’re reflecting

One brand that does this particularly well is Blockfolio.

The goal here is to make your content fit organically within the context it’s being viewed. You know what works when you see it.

A great way to level this up is by being active within Twitter conversations. At the end of the day, Twitter’s value is in the discussions. By inserting your brand into the discourse with content that provides value, you are significantly more likely to endear your brand to the wider community. And those users you win over will inevitably help share your content to others.

There is a tightrope between being conversational and becoming an Alon Musk “reply guy,” but as a marketer it’s your job to find that optimal middle ground.

What do I need to support a successful social marketing program?

This is a big question, but it largely depends on your company’s size, budget, and capabilities. One of the things I always recommend is no matter what you’re planning, make sure there is a key internal stakeholder running the show. The instinct for many crypto founders is to run social media themselves, but over time this becomes less and less feasible as the business grows. So rule #1 is to hire someone to own social media for you.

But what does this person do with their time?

Lots of things, but it really depends on your priorities. But the bottom line is that consistency is king. Make sure you have a plan for your content strategy, which should be made up of three things:

1. Content calendar: draft and create content ahead of time

2. Active monitoring: be aware of the main online conversations of the day

3. Reporting: record your results and derive insights to drive future content strategy

When starting a brand from scratch, marketers have a million different priorities to juggle. Do you focus on earned media or lean into paid? Which audience segment do you test first? What channels do we focus on?

For a lot of companies, the answer to those questions are directly related to budget. Bigger budgets definitely afford more growing space. But I’ve spent a lot of my career working with emerging brands and I find it more helpful to contextualize budget within the context of testing: the more budget you have, the more things you can test. So the goal is to cover as much surface area as possible to test your campaigns leveraging the budget you have.

Creative marketers are able to find and scale those “free” marketing opportunities, like social media, and make them work to serve their business goals.

If you’re looking for more ideas for how to stand out, take a look at Twitter Marketing’s 'Brand Bracket', designed to determine the best tweeting business on the platform. Some fun stuff in there.

Who’s Hiring Marketers in Crypto?

• Email Marketing Lead @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Business Intelligence Analyst @ eToro US [APPLY]

• Social Media Manager @ Blockworks [APPLY]

• Marketing Content Specialist @ Coin Cloud [APPLY]

• Junior Marketing Analyst @ Bitrefill [APPLY]

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