How to build a social presence in web3 and beyond | Ish Verduzco

Transcript

[Music] thank you hey everyone my name is Ish I lead social and Community here at a16z crypto and I'm going to give you all a crash course on how to build a social Presence by the way if you've ever seen a like or retweet come through that'd be me just creeping through the feed I pretty much live my life on social media as you'll see throughout this presentation all right so usually when I talk to Founders the top Winnie the Pooh is what I get back you know we were talking about social media marketing I'm bringing up the fact that they should be active on online and they're usually unamused unamused but they know it's very important for the company and by the end of the conversation and

hopefully by the end of this conversation we get them to be very excited at like the bottom Winnie the Pooh because social platforms are the way that you're gonna you know establish brand establish growth and establish trust within your communities so hopefully we can get you to that bottom end of the food right into this presentation and just a quick snapshot of how I've got into a 16g crypto funny enough when I first started working here um I was asked to do like a very short you know five minute presentation for at our all hands and I had to talk about like you know what I did before working here and I never realized that I only worked at social media companies usually in social media roles so I started off my career at LinkedIn I was there for about five years I led social media for

their biggest business line two billion dollar business then went over to work at snap on global Partnerships and then LED marketing and growth at a social media startup a seat stage startup so that's why I know these little growth hacks and how to get user Acquisitions and stuff like that so safe to say I'm extremely addicted to social media but it's part of my job so I kind of tell myself that it's okay it's worth it awesome before we jump in one quick pull or actually three questions so if you're the person that's posting on social media for your startup raise your hand okay about half of the room if you raise your hand if you feel like you don't have time to be posting on social because you have other priorities okay thank you for the honesty

and last but not least raise your hand if you want to be posting but you don't know what type of content to be posting cool about third of the room awesome hopefully we can answer those three questions and get you guys to a good place to end this so over the next couple of minutes I'm gonna go ahead and share everything that I've learned over the past 10 years it'll be pretty tough It's Gonna feel like a fire hose of information but again this is being recorded so you can rewatch it later and feel free to take photos or take notes so in my experience growing social platforms there's three ways to really grow an audience on social there's one you can be famous which is pretty difficult to do I like to see myself as a Michael Scott in that in that meeting right there just trying to grow an

audience among celebrities and influencers I just have established Brands and established audiences it make it just so easy for them number two you could be controversial which works in the short term but I wouldn't recommend doing just because it's not a very good long-term strategy it could tarnish your brand over time and number three my favorite which is the most sustainable is being helpful and being helpful is kind of a broad term here I kind of break it down in three different aspects the first is you can inform people inform your audience with a particular topic that you're you know a niche and expert in or whatever it is that you're building you can inspire people you know you all are founders here you can Inspire them by your stories and the things that

you're learning and number three you can entertain people by just showing them you know the entire process of being a founder or if you find something funny or if you're really you know good at memes throwing that into your content strategy so in general just trying to help people have a better experience by following you instead of other people online so there's three questions that you're going to want to get started before you develop your content strategy the first and the very simple questions is you know what do you want to achieve you want to grow an audience you want to grow your following do you want to increase brand sentiment maybe you want to you know generate downloads or user acquisition because you have an upcoming launch number two why is this important to you are you going to be doing another round

of fundraising maybe you have a product launch coming up and so you want to you know generate user acquisition or pre-signups before you go ahead and launch a product and last but not least you know when would you want to complete this Buy time boxing things is going to make it way easier than just saying we want a 10xr audience sometime or we want to you know gain 10 000 followers by the end of the year like okay that's that's nice everybody wants a 10x but if you can time box it to say we want to grow our following by 100 this month and then 200 next month and while we're doing that we want to generate 50 people to sign up for our wait list and those are metrics that you can actually work towards so again put a date on everything next you're going to want to identify

your target audience and this is usually what it feels like when you're getting started it's really really crazy chaotic you don't know if you're going for users of your product you know other Founders in the space crypto degens Etc um but luckily I have a good framework for how to identify your target audience and some of this Amanda talked about a bit so it should be fresh seven questions to identify our target audience you can see that I really like these types of themes right very clear to to understand so the first is what types of accounts are you targeting are the other Founders in space are the other businesses in the space other brands in the space influencers in the space potential users Etc

number two where in the world are they located this one is really difficult for crypto and web 3 because there's so many people that are Anonymous but the more information and data you can get around where people are from is going to help you in terms of when you're going to be posting maybe the types of posts you're going to be posting and maybe even the topics number three and actually just backtracking to number two really quick if you're really having a hard time finding out where they're located you can use like analytic tools like Twitter should be able to tell you where you're getting this the engagement from or like a growth hacky way to do it is like straight up going to your Discord or wherever you have your community and just say like drop your flags below where is everybody from and being able

to get a good hunch of like okay well 50 of our audience is in the UK well maybe we shouldn't be posting on us times because they're not seeing it they're all asleep for three what other accounts do they follow online what are the big influencers that they follow the content creators that they follow this is going to help you when you're like staring at a blank screen trying to figure out what it is to tweet or what it is to post so who do they follow what type of content do they engage with number four probably one of the most important ones uh is what social platforms do they use most you're not going to be wanting to use Instagram if all they're using is Twitter very simple number five what are their favorite topics to engage with one way to kind of figure this out is

going back to look at what are the accounts that they've other people follow the big creators in the space and then going through their content to see what's their top performing content go through their last 50 posts and then try to organize them in terms of like what did really well with them and bucket them into themes so that you can use these themes for yourself number six how do they use social media everybody uses social media differently even everybody in this room uses it differently for some people social media Twitter Instagram Etc is uh you know a tool to just decompress to kind of just like mindlessly scroll for other people like myself use social media to connect with people for others they use it as a learning platform their Twitter is only content

that they want to just learn from and so really understanding your target audience and how they use the social platforms that you want to be on is going to help shape what you're going to be posting number seven your value proposition so why the heck should people follow you like why is your account going to be different than every other account of a Founder that's building in a space you know what's what are you going to be able to to give to people by uh you know lending them your time next super super important here you're going to want to select two social platforms if you're getting started you know you are all founders here and you juggle 10 different things at once building a product managing A Team all of these other crazy things being active on more

than two social platforms is just not like sustainable it's overwhelming so whether you have like a head of marketing or you have somebody that's kind of owning your channels if you're trying to develop them for your own channels as a Founder then you shouldn't be active on three four five or six platforms get started with two and the goal is to build the muscle of creating high quality content over time and then scale out to a third one or hire somebody to help you create content and manage those platforms remember Focus here okay so you've identified your target audience you're posting regularly on social media maybe you're getting some feedback from your community next you want to measure what the heck does success look like and so let's break it down there's two ways to measure success for

social there's a qualitative way which to be honest a lot of people overlook this it's like the fluffy stuff that you can't really it's really tough to to measure and then the quantitative which is the stuff that everybody wants to measure the following the growth the engagement all the numbers so my suggestion to you all would be like I know you're you're all founders you're extremely driven you're going to look at the quantitative metrics but spend more time on the qualitative so feedback replies questions try to look at themes of the recurring you know inbound messages that you're receiving you know your DMs Etc all this stuff tells you how people feel about your brand and here's some examples

so my team knows that I'm notorious for just always sending them stuff in terms of mentions that we get online because building a brand is everybody's job it's not just your job as a Founder it's not just the head of marketer's job and so if you're seeing this qualitative feedback online a simple way just to get the message across everybody in the team is to copy it send it in slack send it in Discord and say hey look we got a message from so and so I've noticed we keep getting this type of message from our community must be a good sign that we're doing something well um again I'm looking for the words that people are using positive negative neutral and on a you know long-term basis on a month two months three months six months even a year is it trending up is it trending down

are we getting more negative mentions are we getting more positive mentions and then the quantitative feedback so the numbers this is what everybody wants here and kind of like the waterfall approach that I like to tell people is you're going to want to increase your engagement which increases your impressions your total reach which waterfalls into profile visits which waterfalls into followers so engagement is always going to be the number one metric that you're going to want to strive for um and it'll help you know Drive traffic back to your accounts which if you can convert them turns into followers and another way to measure you know if your content is well is doing well um is using in-app Analytics

don't need to get super crazy fancy you don't need to use these crazy tools I mean Sprout social and those tools are really good for scheduling but I would say at this stage just using the in-app analytics Twitter analytics Instagram analytics LinkedIn analytics is just going to be like a perfect way to get started uh kind of like a little tip that I would do here if you're on Twitter go to your analytics you can reverse chronological uh order by best performing posts and bottom performing posts and then what I would do is try to find themes okay for the past 60 days or 30 days what are the top five performing posts are there any themes that we're seeing with these wow we've noticed that all of our memes do really well or our homies memes do bad or every time we include a

you know a Blog link it does mediocre or every time we talk about this particular topic or post on this particular day or this particular time it does well and so you're going to want to jot these things down so you can kind of scale them and you know make them into a framework and processes what to track these are things that I personally track on a weekly basis on a daily basis sometimes is engagement your likes your comments your shares replies you don't need to get like super granular and get down to the exact number but just overall how are you trending over time if your content is doing well then the engagement should be going up over time reach the total number of times your content has been seen you know this is the way that you're going to grow your accounts by getting

into more audiences more um you know Circles of people increasing your reach and conversions so for those of you who have launched a product already this is how much traffic are you driving from social over to your landing page or to your sub stack or to your podcast or wherever you want to capture that audience in how you know how is social playing up playing a role there followers I know we've talked about that and everybody likes to talk about that but like more than anything track what content is driving spikes in your following so I was talking to somebody today and they said that um a post uh drove 2 000 followers yesterday the post that they did yesterday and I

think it was the spaces that they did and so that's a you know telling sign if you can do that on a regular basis maybe not daily but maybe weekly or monthly then you can rely on that to drive consistent growth for your social channels and then last but not least actually this is probably my favorite one is your top and bottom performing posts which you just talked about try to deconstruct what made something good versus what made something bad takes a little bit of creativity but I'm sure you guys could do it awesome so now let's talk about content strategy which is going to be the life and you know the blood of your entire growth strategy four questions and Amanda talked about this as well four questions you're going to want to answer and your entire team should be able to answer these

um in order to shape your content strategy the first what product are you building like be very intricate with your answer very detailed number two who is your product for number three how can people use your product and number four what problem or problems does your product solve the reason why you want to write these down and include them in your content strategy is because you're going to be repeatedly answering them on a weekly basis it's not just good enough to have them on your landing page or you know on your email or some inbound message when people you know in your Discord you have to be repeatedly answering this on your social platforms because you can't expect people just to automatically know you know what it is that you do you what

does he do or why you exist and so you can get creative with like Twitter spaces threads maybe short from videos podcasts and pick a topic pick one of these that you want to go really deep on next I want to talk about content formatting and here's four examples that I think did really awesome job first is Bellow I think they did a really good job with the video announcement that they had stand out in the feed um short succinct and as you could tell it drove a really really awesome engagement next is shield with their recent announcement I think the thread which is beautifully written I love the imagery as well stands out in the feed too you're scrolling through Twitter a mile a minute it really does stand out I think foremost does a really good job of humanizing the brand over on

Instagram and using reels I don't think very many you know web3 or crypto platforms or tools would be using Instagram but it really does work for them and then last but not least I think David has done a really good job throughout the entire program of just sharing like the founder perspective I'm at crypto startup School here's what I'm learning here's what I'm meeting all that stuff is really awesome so the tldr here is create content for the platform that you're actually posting on don't just like create it once and cross-pollinate it across every platform little tweaks here and there with the formatting with the spacing using tabs on Twitter so it stands out better it looks better if you're on LinkedIn maybe using a long form post but making it so that you know I think it's the third tab makes people click so

if you have a really long form post make sure that third line is like eye grabbing because you want people to click read more and then read the entire thing so just understanding how these social platforms are formatted is going to help you when you when you're trying to send out awesome okay one of the biggest questions that I get from Founders is like I know I should be doing this I know it's really important but I don't really know like what to post or how to post or the types of content that you know I can do on a regular basis and so I have these themes that everybody here can use on a weekly basis on a monthly basis and what I would do if I were you all is pick one day a week for each of these so maybe Mondays it's you're gonna

do a product update every single Monday a small product that here's here's something we shipped something we worked on something that we're working on maybe every Wednesday you do like a community question write down a list of the top 10 questions that you think your community is going to engage with and hopefully the responses add value to everybody else let's go into that question so that it's not just like a silly question to get engagement and then maybe Fridays you're doing like a founder of reflection here's what I learned this week here's what I did this week here's what I shipped this week here's what I'm doing this weekend Etc and so when you think about these on a long-term scale you can repeatedly do them like crank them out you can knock out like 20 Community questions in one hour you sit down with your co-founders

um founder Reflections you can do that every week because you're just reflecting on what you did or were you planning to do so the goal here is to try to create like systems and Frameworks so you're not stuck at the blank screen trying to figure out what it is you're going to post which you know it's really scary to do next is content Cadence uh this meme really really uh brings to life how I feel about people when they are creating content and it's not really doing so hot so they think that the answer is create more content like the thread boys thing on Twitter crypto Twitter that's a thing you know people just bumping out content they're like oh it's not really doing well zero likes one like so the idea is like oh let's just do 10 more threads and then it doesn't really do well

um and so I'm going to talk about my framework for Content Cadence start with quality measure with your in-app analytics next consistency next quantity so again quality as measured by your analytics Impressions comments retweets bookmarks consistency okay you got one post per week then we get to two per week can we get to one per day and then if the metrics are staying consistent or staying maybe even increasing then you can increase your content quality over time or quantity over time again trying to build that muscle of creating content you shouldn't just expect yourselves to be able to do it straight off the gate like this is

you're really trying to build a muscle and again you're using in-app analytics to measure the quality measure the performance Impressions engagements did a post-drive new followers being able to measure that as well luckily Twitter shows that which is awesome next is Community Management so I oftentimes feel like Opera right here when I'm jumping into the a16z crypto Twitter you know you get a like you get a retweet you get a reply everybody gets engagement but all jokes aside Community Management is like a huge part of my personal growth strategy for any social platform that I manage if you're posting content and is doing well but you're not actually replying to

the people that are commenting then you have you're leaving so much on the table because every time you reply it helps Bubble Up that content to the top of the feed and then maybe maybe they reply again or somebody else in their Network sees it they reply then it bubbles it again so you're tapping into new audiences every single time not just getting like a one chance at getting the post be seen and you don't have to over complicate this at all you don't need any fancy tools it literally just means every single morning while you're having your coffee 15 minutes 10 minutes going into the platforms and engaging with people who are replying to you or replying to people's questions trying to be helpful in any way that you can one thing that I like to tell people about Community Management is like this

is how you build super fans so if anybody here has ever gotten a reply from like one of your favorite celebrities or maybe like a musician or an athlete like you actually comment on their Instagram post or LinkedIn post or Twitter posts or whatever and they actually reply to you like how magical that moment is you feel like so special I know it's happened to me um and then uh that point moving forward like how you feel so much more attached to them so much more loyal to them you're trying to do the same thing with your brands make people feel seen make them feel heard really does go a long way I know it's kind of like touchy feely but it does go a long way and here are some examples of Community Management again I do this every single day trying to get back to as many

replies as possible sometimes it's overwhelming but it's worth it because it works um and again you don't need to be comp it doesn't need to be complicated with your replies I use a lot of emojis just to let people know that you know I saw your message I'm acknowledging it here's a reply but sometimes there's ways where you can you know take it one step further and be super helpful so I think there's one of these examples where somebody was asking if the session was going to be recorded or asking for a particular podcast and I take it like you know customer service above and beyond go find that link and just put it there for them don't make them look for it and then that drives you know more loyalty which in Social terms drives a more engagement I bet you that person moving forward

probably said notifications or liked our next post or engaged with our next post retweeted our next post that's how you build super fans all right this is a fun part so building a brand account versus building a Founder account oftentimes I'm sure everybody in this room who has both of them has felt like this Spider-Man just pointing at each other because the content is the same maybe or it kind of sounds the same or that you know the voice in tone is all similar maybe even use the exact same content on both on both handles which is kind of a No-No but we can work around it so how do you differentiate between your brand account and your personal founder account that you own here's one way so your brand account should be like the

company point of view it should show like the macro progress of how the company is doing maybe even spotlighting you know team member community members um you should have a very consistent voice in tone that anybody who owns that account or manages that account or any new social media manager Community manager anybody who has access to that account should be on board with what the voice in tone is if three people have access to it and they're all posting content it should still feel like one voice in tone for Brandon County you could also share like company updates like I said spotlighting community members and your founder account similar but you're sharing your personal founder perspective your point of view what are you learning what are you experiencing what are you thinking about

you're showcasing your journey as a Founder throughout this program and building a company and you're sharing your personal insights which can be slightly different than sharing what the company learned so again the two can have similar types of content but should be differentiated especially when it comes to the voice and tone you know you're not going to want your uh your brand account can have some inspiration from how like you know the founders personalities but it shouldn't sound identical to like the founders accounts because then with the point of following both of them and that's what you want you want people to follow your account the brand accounts you can capture that audience in two places and an example for a brand account that I think does a good job is Yoga labs

great mix of content they highlight their Founders you know they do company updates and they also like keep their their Community informed all the time with what they're doing I think they do an awesome job with the imagery as well feels very consistent that's what you're looking for consistency and as for a Founder example I think Dan from farcaster does an awesome job of just building in public and funny enough he's kind of building a little bit of like a Twitter competitor yet he's still leveraging Twitter on a daily basis to drive traffic to forecaster or to let people know about farcaster um you know he's like doing an A plus job at building in public but more than anything I like

that not all of his content is just like forecaster related I would say like 10 or 20 of his content is about just like macro thoughts what does he think about an industry what are things that he's learning uh what's web three and crypto related stuff that he's kind of been you know digging into I think that is super important when you're trying to build a good founder account because if all you're talking about is your company and what you're building then it kind of comes off a little chilly whereas if you mix it in with things that you're learning that are maybe tangential related to your your product or your company but not directly related then it just comes off a lot better easier to consume awesome so we got most of the tough stuff out next is what people usually ask me for is like Hey how do I grow how

do I 10x like quickly I need to like do this fast and while there isn't like a guaranteed um way to like 10x overnight there is a simple framework that I've already touched on so increased engagement social engagement is going to increase your reach which will increase your following which increases your engagement and the cycle just repeats so increased engagement what does that mean that means like more likes more replies more retweets which help you reach new audiences increase reach you're reaching more people and hopefully works like a funnel some of those people click on your account they find you interesting and a portion of them hit follow which then increases your total addressable

audience or your total audience on social and then the cycle repeats one way to do this is encourage or entice shares and replies so these are some of our best performing posts for a60z crypto you can take and model this after yourselves or for yourselves um one thing that I'll say is like if you're going to straight up ask questions for your audience with the intent of getting like a crazy engagement make sure that the replies to that question could potentially add value to everybody else it's not just like you know baby content um for example I don't think this one's up here but I did one that was um I think it was what's your favorite or you know tiger favorite Founders and

another one that did even better was what's your favorite web3 tools and then everybody was just tagging in their favorite Weaponry tools that they use and so like as a builder if you're going ahead even if you don't reply to that post and you went through like the Thousand replies you're gonna get some value out of that right so thinking about questions and reverse engineering them so that the output adds value to everybody who goes ahead and looks through the responses another growth hack very simple but sometimes difficult to do in practice is cross-platform promo so in the essence what you're trying to do is take one audience that you have on one platform and get them to follow you or engage with you on another platform this could be Discord to Twitter Twitter to email

email to podcasts podcast to website website back to Twitter if you can capture people let's say you have a thousand followers on Twitter and you have a huge announcement coming up you post the announcement and it gets pretty whack engagement or you know not very many people see it whereas if you have a thousand followers on Twitter half of them also subscribe to your newsletter half of those people you know also follow you on Instagram or follow your personal LinkedIn and you make that announcement on all those social platforms at once now the likelihood of more people seeing that announcement is much higher because you're uh your reach is just a lot bigger than it would be on one social platform so a couple of tips for gaming the

algorithm if you will sometimes it kind of feels like that but hopefully the tips will make you feel like the the image on the right so avoid links when possible the reason why is very simple I mean we all are Builders here you might understand social platforms want to keep people on their platform so anytime you include a link and drive people to another platform like a blog or podcast they're going to reduce your reach I think forecasters probably the only social platform right now that doesn't do that and he's Dan has said it publicly but most web 2 social platforms are going to reduce your reach and you can even test this for yourself you know post a meme and then two days later post a link to your blog most of the times the reach is way lower which in turn your engagement is lower which

in turn less people see it and just like the cycle continues like a growth attack around it is using like a screenshot of whatever you're trying to post and including it in the replies or in the comments or telling people hey if you want to check this out DMS or go to our website Lincoln bio like you know growth hacky ways around it from putting the link in your first post next very simple but engaging in the feed regularly so you all not only as like you know users of these platforms as content creators of these platforms you're being rated you know yes you're getting some content engagement from the stuff you're posting but are you actually using the platforms personally there's a time that I took off of using like I think it was LinkedIn or even Twitter for a while and

I have a sizeable audience on both of them and then I came back and started posting in my in my number of Impressions and reach was just like 10 of what it was before and it's because you know if you're not using the platforms then why are they going to give you reach back format for the platform that you're actually creating for number four use in-app tools and content formats so if you're on Twitter use giphy it's already integrated in the tool if you're on Twitter use spaces if you're on LinkedIn do polls use the tools that are created in the app or in the tool itself because oftentimes they'll give you an extra boost in reach and if you kind of reverse engineered as Builders think about it like there's there's a product managers at the on the

other sides of these uh these companies right so they want people to use certain features because they have kpis and if the feature is front and center in the app or in the tool then it's easier to use and you're probably going to get more reach because they're boosting it number five probably the most practical one optimize for shares comments and bookmarks so whenever you're trying to whenever you can make somebody take an action on your piece of content or Elon just actually announced this the other day saying that more time spent on tweets equates to more organic reach so getting people to stop look at your content maybe engage with it maybe share it bookmark it to save later it's going

to help you with your with your reach number six Drive engagement within the first few minutes I'm also notorious for doing this on my personal and for company related stuff so whenever we post something that's a really big announcement we'll go ahead and share it to like as many people as possible within the firm or within friends or people that I know who are going to engage with the content you can do this as well you know within the cohort or within your founder friends or within your with your co-founders if you post something share it have them like it engage it retweet it vice versa trying to drive engagement within the first couple of minutes is going to tell the platform this is a good piece of content give it to more people show it to more people and then the cycle continues and last but not least revive Old Post

by adding a comment or a retweet so I've done this a few times it is pretty pretty well if the content is still relevant later on um so let's say you post something three months ago it was an absolute like awesome post it has crazy engagement three months has passed replying to that and saying you know what are your thoughts about this or does anybody have any questions about this particular topic or if it's on Twitter or even LinkedIn just reposting it sending it right to the back top of your feed because the likelihood of every single one of your followers seeing it the first time around is like slim to nothing so finding ways to get your best performing content to get more reach okay

last section which I kind of wanted to dedicate an entire slide to is Twitter growth I know everybody here is pretty active on Twitter or aspires to be more active so I have a little bit of a 10 step framework with an example for how to grow on Twitter some of this is uh similar to what we talked about and what Amanda talked about too but I think it's good to have it all in one place one Define your audience who are you trying to reach not on social media but on Twitter specifically crypto Twitter is different than any other social platform that I've seen uh it's like a ecosystem within itself who are you trying to reach within crypto Twitter are they even in crypto Twitter or are they just web 2 users they're trying to onboard two Define your value proposition on Twitter specifically

and is it different from it from your other social platforms like are you going to be known for the person that does daily threads on XYZ topic are you going to be known for the person who does you know breakdowns of companies that do really well with X particular topic being known for something number three optimize your your bio your photo and your banner again this sounds very simple but it goes a long way because the way these things work is like a it's a funnel if thousands of people are landing on your page every single day you're trying to convert as many of them as possible to be followers and you're using social proof your banner your image and your bio that's like your sales pitch you know you don't have very many characters to

use but that's what you're trying to use to convert people number four add a pin tweet again this is social proof what's the topic that you want to be known for write a thread about it write it you know write a long form post about it include media and then pin that to your top of your your account because if thousands of people are landing on your page that's the person that they're going to see so you're trying to convince them you're worth the follow or you would add value to their Network number five send notifications for similar accounts in the space other builders influencers creators maybe pick five of them and once in a while when they post try to engage with their content yes you're trying to build relationships but more than anything you're trying to

increase your own reach and so one way to do it is to reverse engineer finding pockets of people that probably would like your content and finding what other content do they engage with already they're probably other creators in the space are already doing it and getting seen by engaging in the replies engaging with their content is how you're going to grow six seemingly very simple but again sharing content consistently is going to help your algorithm rank higher over time because it tells these platforms that you're active on the platform tells Twitter that you're active on Twitter number seven Community Management so we're replying to your mentions on a daily basis really does go a long way number eight engaging in the feed on a

daily basis number nine a little framework that I like to say to people especially people who are building something is give five times more than you ask in return so oftentimes if you're building something that you're very proud of the gut reaction is you want to say hey download this check this out look what I built look what I'm doing which is fine to do once in a while but it shouldn't be every single post thought leadership here here here and then finally you ask for something in return which is like a subscribe or a download or check this out or join our community number ten again iterate based on feedback and Analytics is your content doing well objectively speaking look at the numbers Impressions engagements replies

bookmarks usually a good tell too if your content is really good and if thought leadership related the bookmarks will tell you if it's good and then I think Richard does a really good job at this look at his one of his top performing posts which is on the bottom right we can see how many likes I got I can't see how many Impressions they got but I'm pretty sure it did really well he did a thread on securing your nfts so last year so I'm willing to bet that that drove a good amount of following to his account because it's uh something that you can read at any point in time it is extremely related to what he's building his Niche is space and it's been to the top of his account so everybody who lands on his page whether they're a fan of what he's

building at all or not would probably want to click follow if they're interested in nfts because that social proof just convinces people and I also like that he's very active in the feed and engaging with other nft creators content creators in the space not just using Twitter to like blast what he's trying to say so final takeaway is my super important very fancy takeaway for you all is at the end of the day I just shared a ton of information you can take you know what you see fit but being helpful and like focusing niching down one or two platforms is going to you know actually grow your your Twitter audience so you can try to be active on five social

platforms to be stuck in the middle um you can try to share content all the time but you're going to burn out so if you have Frameworks that you can use if you have focus and you're actually trying to be helpful versus just you know shielding what you're what you're doing then over the long term you'll grow an audience so that's all that I have for you today thank you questions so I had to discussed this question about like when it comes to replying uh to people who are reaching out to you people who are dming you creating tickets in your Discord so I feel like we've recently gotten a lot of inbound from people who want to like be our community manager I don't know why

for your Twitter account yeah I mean Twitter Discord a lot of people just kind of coming in and saying like oh we can help you do this for your Discord and all that stuff so I'm just wondering like what how do you think about replying to people that can feel a little bit like it starts to feel like spam in a lot of ways and you kind of just want to like I don't want to deal with this or or are there still ways you should think about like providing value or fitting those people into a funnel in a way that they can be helpful to your brand yeah I mean you could develop like a community brand ambassador program where it's like 10 or 20 people who are extensions of the brand but not like employees of the company um or you can straight up just have like

a response ready to go for anybody that asks for that open position and say hey we're not hiring at the time we're kind of like owning this ourselves but down the line we'll keep your information um so I think more than anything is just about like getting back to people especially from your company company account or your founder account because then people go like you know they send you a message and they put pour their heart out and you don't get back to them it's like not not a good feeling you know yeah that makes sense yeah but I've seen the community like uh almost like Ambassador model work pretty well depending on like the the audience that you're trying to to capture um so that could work yeah yeah we'll we'll look into the ambassadorship as well thank you

hey ish great talk as always um I have a question around audience growth like follower growth Community growth overall right so last talk uh we talked about how actually uh Community or audience grows in Step functions so you have a big announcement a bunch of followers right but here you're kind of talking about continuous growth right like just built that over time so most things we don't have control over like fundraising or a big client success fine whatever right but product update is something we have control over so do you recommend we drop that weekly or bi-weekly you know engage the community or save for a big one like some people do launch type events at conferences like make a big splash of which one do you recommend more yeah I think I think there's like three answers to that

question so in terms of like the type when to use like the product update it's kind of depending on like where you are with the product stage so it could be monthly like every first of the month doing a report or a small thread it could be bi-weekly it could be weekly it kind of depends on where you are but in terms of like driving spikes of growth one thing that you can control is like the thought leadership content which if you kind of again reverse engineer it the name of the game is getting in front of more people how do you get in front of more people you get retweets you get reposts you get reshares if that's on Instagram on stories and so thinking through what content you think your audience is likely to re-share and creating that on a regular basis increases your like at bats to

potentially get a viral piece of content which then will drive that growth like the product update I think might not drive like the the like the viral growth but it's good for brand building because it keeps you top of mind and keeps people like you know remembering why the heck they're following at the end of the day cool cool cool I have a few ideas stay tuned yeah uh thank you for the Fantastic talk for uh so my question is uh how do I find an ish for my startup um more specifically uh like what are some high signal questions I can ask a a potential interviewee uh that might reveal their aptitude or social media um I'm a fan of uh like project-based work through the interview process but

maybe just not making it related to like your company because then people feel like they got you know used for free work um but asking them to do like you know here's our here's what we're building here's our audience here's the audience that we think we're trying to Target here's some of the kpis and then asking them like you know broad Strokes how would you bring this to social what social platforms would you use um what would be your social media strategy your content strategy and then trying to like you know Scythe through the people who are just fake social media managers that have audiences but don't really understand why and how they built them and then the people that actually know what they're building and how they're doing social so project-based work I think works really well for social it's good thank you yeah yes I thought

the talk was genius so thank you so much um given your deep expertise at combating the social media algorithm and your Mastery of it what do you see as the core opportunity for the future of Social and what do you want it to look like going forward I'm a fan of uh I mean like decentralized protocols and being able to create your own feed and having options as a user to be able to tap into you know I don't really like the way this platform is going I want to use another one but I want to keep my audience and so that's my biggest frustration with web2 is like I've been on social since I was like I don't know 14 and as social platforms you know buying Myspace building audiences and then like

losing them is probably my biggest frustration so I think interoperability and being able to like take one audience somewhere and keep them not just try to transfer them over like funnel them into another platform it's probably the most exciting for me yeah I would agree thank you yeah awesome well thanks so much ish that was fantastic yeah thank you [Applause] [Music]