Its deep reasons are closely tied to its core principles and technical characteristics. Firstly, Web3 is built upon the principle of decentralization, which means power no longer resides in a few centralized institutions but is distributed across every node in the network. This decentralized nature necessitates a broad and active community to collectively maintain the network’s security, stability, and growth.
Secondly, Web3 exhibits global characteristics. With the proliferation of the internet and strengthened global connectivity, Web3 is not confined to any specific region or country but is oriented towards global users. Therefore, a diverse and inclusive community is crucial for the global development of Web3.
Such a community can attract talent from different backgrounds and fields to drive innovation and application of Web3 technology together.
Furthermore, as a new technological framework and business paradigm, Web3 requires continuous exploration, practice, and improvement.
In this process, community participation and contribution are paramount. The community can pool collective wisdom to address technical challenges and business hurdles in Web3 development through collaborative creation, building, sharing, and governance. Moreover, the community continuously provides innovative momentum to the ecosystem of Web3, driving its ongoing evolution and advancement.
Lastly, the Web3 community is not merely a platform for communication but a collective for value creation. Within this collective, each member can gain corresponding rewards and recognition through their efforts and contributions. This model of shared governance and collaboration can stimulate the enthusiasm and creativity of community members, fostering the sustainable development of the Web3 ecosystem.
Community involvement and contribution are key to ensuring the healthy operation of Web3 projects. To establish a truly active community, it is necessary to address the current challenges faced in Web3 community building one by one.
Community Building Challenges
Resource Constraints
At the project’s outset, there may be limited manpower, time, and financial resources to support community-building efforts. Community managers often need to accomplish a lot with few resources available.
Lack of Mature Operational Experience and Management Mechanisms
Building a community from scratch requires community managers to test different strategies to find the one that best suits the project. However, this trial-and-error process usually comes with high risks and costs. Given the limited resources of the team, community managers must cautiously undertake these risks and cannot afford to try too many approaches.
Customer Acquisition Difficulties
High product usage barriers and poor user experience are significant challenges for Web3 projects in acquiring customers. Compared to the multiple-channel customer acquisition strategies of Web2, Web3’s customer acquisition is much more difficult. Additionally, during bull markets, new projects emerge continuously, increasing competition and giving users more choices. Even attracting existing Web3 users is challenging since they have many options, and projects must compete with numerous competitors.
Scarcity of Attention and High Liquidity
Because of the decentralized nature and global background of Web3 projects, users face vast amounts of information and choices, leading to limited attention spans. Users can easily switch between and transfer among different projects. This high liquidity results in relatively low user loyalty. If a project fails to meet user expectations or provides a poor experience, users are likely to leave.
Low Awareness and Weak Community Culture
The entire market is highly profit-driven, with users more focused on how to make a profit rather than the intrinsic value of the projects. This results in low awareness of the project itself. Focusing too much on token generation events (TGEs) to attract users can result in low loyalty. This hinders the development of the community’s atmosphere and culture, which is required to progress from the initial stages to maturity.
To construct an active Web3 community, it is essential to comprehensively consider community positioning, define values, and develop strategies for different stages of community growth.
Category and Stages
Community Category
Core Category and Target Audience
Determine the core focus of your Web3 community and its target audience. For example, is it about crypto art or decentralized finance (DeFi)? Define your target group, such as art enthusiasts or fintech professionals.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
Identify what sets your community apart and why users would choose to join yours over competitors’. This could be specific services, technological advantages, or community culture.
Value Proposition
What value will your community provide to users? How will users find satisfaction and a sense of belonging in your community? Consider aspects such as social interaction, knowledge sharing, project collaboration, asset trading, and asset returns.
Community Stages
In the development journey of Web3 communities, different stages are encountered, each with its own objectives:
Initial Stage
During the initial stage of a Web3 community, the focus is primarily on establishing the community, building the brand, and initiating initial user acquisition.
Goals:
- Establish brand awareness to attract early adopters and supporters.
- Define core value propositions and community positioning.
Growth Stage
Once the community starts attracting more users and participants, it is crucial to find the Product-Market Fit (PMF) and boost the activity level of community members.
Goals:
- Increase community activity, and enhance user engagement and interaction frequency.
- Expand the community ecosystem by increasing participation from partners and projects.
Mature Stage
Once the community reaches a certain scale with stable active users, attention turns towards sustainable development and long-term operational stability.
Goals:
- Ensure long-term sustainability and growth of the community.
- Enhance community quality and deepen engagement to drive more complex projects and collaborations.
- Expand community influence and position within the industry.
Each stage requires adjusting strategies based on specific circumstances and market changes while staying attuned to user needs and industry trends. Successful Web3 communities can sustainably attract new users, retain existing ones, and maintain competitive advantage and vitality through continuous development.
The community’s needs across different stages can be summarized as Acquisition, Activation, Conversion, and Retention.
Community Customer Acquisition
When establishing a community, the first step is customer acquisition. A community can only exist where there are people. The first challenge community managers face is how to acquire customers. By considering the following three questions, community managers can find the best way to acquire customers for the community:
Who: Identify Target Users
Web3 can be broadly divided into transactional and non-transactional tracks, with significant differences in the behaviors and habits of these two user groups.
Users who do on-chain transactions: These users focus primarily on market fluctuations and investment opportunities, aiming to maximize returns. They are highly sensitive to the security and liquidity of trading platforms, tend to use professional trading tools and platforms and pay attention to the technical strength and team background of projects.
Users without on-chain transactions: These users are more interested in the application of digital assets in real-life and innovative fields. They value community building, product features, and user experience, and are willing to contribute time and resources to socially impactful and creative projects.
By identifying the target users for community acquisition, community managers can tailor acquisition hooks based on the characteristics of different user groups and product attributes.
What: The Acquisition Hooks
For Users who do on-chain transactions: TGE is one of the fastest ways to attract these users, but relying solely on TGE is not conducive to the long-term and healthy development of the community because of the low loyalty of such users.
Community managers should consider multiple factors when choosing hooks. Besides TGE, they can promote the product’s professionalism, security, solutions, and technical strength of the project.
For Users without on-chain transactions: These users are more abstract and focus on connections between people. Therefore, the community manager’s hooks should resonate emotionally with this group, making them feel that this project and community can deepen their identity in the virtual world.
Community managers need to carefully consider choosing appropriate hooks. Inappropriate hooks may lead to unrealistic expectations before users join the community, resulting in a backlash effect.
Where: Channel Selection
In addition to traditional channels such as social platforms and media advertisements, Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) are also an important channel for many projects. Over time, growth platforms have also become a choice for more projects. For example, since 2023, 1inch has launched growth activities on the TaskOn growth platform:
Why Are More Community Managers Choosing Growth Conversion Platforms Like TaskOn?
Powerful User Data and Analytics
Growth platforms typically have robust user data and analytical capabilities, helping communities precisely target their ideal user groups. This means that promotional and marketing activities can be directed toward the most likely interested users, improving the efficiency of community customer acquisition.
Reduced User Education Costs
Users acquired through growth platforms generally possess basic knowledge about Web3, which reduces the workload of community managers in educating new users.
Leverage Platform Growth Incentives
Growth platforms often have their own growth incentives, aiming to attract more users to achieve their growth goals. Collaborating with these platforms can fully utilize their growth momentum, achieving a “growth x growth” effect, and helping communities expand rapidly.
Lower Customer Acquisition Costs
Compared to traditional marketing channels, using growth platforms for customer acquisition typically lowers costs. Growth platforms have a large user base and traffic, meaning communities don’t need to invest significant funds in advertising or marketing activities.
In a limited budget scenario, community managers must carefully select channels to maximize the use of their resources. Whether it’s platform paid ads, KOLs, or growth platforms, managers need to evaluate the costs. If choosing a growth platform, there are many options in the market. Community managers need to fully understand the usage fees and effectiveness of each growth platform and monitor their changes and trends to ensure maximum acquisition effectiveness.
Activation
To guide new users to participate and increase their engagement:
Clear user profiling × Precise hooks × Channels = Maximized customer acquisition traffic. Once the growth model is determined and executed, the community starts growing in numbers. However, community managers need to be aware that simple join-and-quit behaviors do not count as real community growth. Managers need to convert channel-driven traffic into genuine community members.
Community Content
To address the issue of low awareness, enriching community content is crucial. The content within a community plays a vital role when members first engage with it. It determines their first impression, understanding of discussion topics, and what they can expect, subtly adjusting new users’ mindsets.
Considering new users may have a highly profit-driven mindset, the community’s content should be both attractive and educational, helping users understand the core values of the community and promoting interaction and communication with other members. Community managers can focus on educational content and interactive content when creating community material.
Educational Content: Deliver Valuable Information and Knowledge
Educational content is essential in community building. New members who cannot quickly obtain the necessary information or understand the project’s positioning may lose interest and turn to other projects.
To prevent this, community managers should convey valuable information and knowledge to new members through means such as publishing special articles and guides, and organizing AMA (Ask Me Anything) events. This helps new members better understand the project’s core concepts and values.
Additionally, product manuals are also crucial. A well-crafted help manual can significantly reduce repetitive tasks for community managers. Not only does it assist members in understanding the project’s positioning, but it also serves as the first reference material when members start experiencing the product. For instance, Ethereum provides developers and users with a comprehensive, step-by-step Ethereum operation manual:
Interactive Content: Promoting User and Product Interaction
Community interaction can be divided into member-to-member interaction and member-to-product interaction. For community managers, the core goal of community operations is to promote member-to-product interaction and quickly convert community members into product users.
To achieve this, community managers can design engaging challenges and tasks, using gamified interactions to cultivate user habits in using the product. This is the first step in transforming members into product users, so this process must be simple and easy to follow.
Some community managers set up Q&A sessions on third-party community platforms, embedding the project’s key messages in these questions. As users explore the answers, they gradually build an initial impression of the project without realizing it.
TaskOn supports setting up systematic Q&A collections in various formats, such as simple questions or multiple-choice questions. The survey mode can also help projects quickly gather user feedback.
Interactive content is not limited to Q&A. In DeFi and GameFi communities, the goal is to encourage users to gain a deeper understanding of the product through active use.
Conversion
To convert active users into long-term supporters and users:
Define Conversion Goals
Before starting conversion efforts, clearly define your conversion goals. Determine whether you aim for users to frequently use product features, participate in activities, or become paying customers. Establish specific and measurable conversion metrics to track and evaluate conversion effectiveness.
Create Conversion Scenarios
Within the community, create scenarios aligned with your conversion goals to guide users through the conversion process. For example, if you operate a DEX and want users to frequently use the swap feature, share daily token market updates and introduce fee reduction promotions within the community. If aiming for paid subscriptions, share user experiences with the product and interactive discounts.
Frequency
Increasing user frequency plays a crucial role in forming user habits. Habit formation requires consistent and repeated actions to gradually solidify and deepen. To foster long-term commitment from users, it’s essential to create an environment that continuously reminds and engages them.
Incentive Measures
Through carefully designed incentive schemes, it is possible to effectively stimulate user enthusiasm, encouraging them to actively participate and complete the conversion process.
When crafting these incentives, integration with other systems such as tiered structures and points systems, including perks associated with rankings and leaderboard standings, can instill a sense of competitiveness among users. Taskon Community enhances project conversion and sustainable development by introducing a multi-tiered points system and a Benefit Shop.
(Introducing why establish a points system, and how to build an incentive system)
In designing incentive measures, project managers must prioritize fairness and sustainability. Fairness ensures all users have equal opportunities to earn rewards, without restrictions or exclusions based on specific conditions.
Moreover, these incentives must maintain their appeal over time, adapting to evolving user needs and preferences without losing their allure.
Finally, managers must also ensure that incentive measures are integrated seamlessly into the overall user experience.
These measures should not exist solely to improve conversions but should be integrated into the entire user experience, providing users with higher quality and more convenient services. Therefore, when designing these measures, it is essential to consider their alignment with the overall user interface.
Many projects choose to embed incentive measures within product functionalities’ pages.
Orbiter Finance introduces a points system and prominently places incentive reminders in the user interface.
In addition, many projects choose to embed their incentive measures directly on their official websites, presenting them as a dedicated subpage directly accessible to users.
TaskOn Community supports project creators in customizing domain names and adapting theme colors when setting up their community.
Community Influence
In Web3, we recognize the crucial importance of community influence. To strengthen our community, leveraging its inherent power can be highly effective. KOLs and active users are not just enthusiastic participants but also pivotal in shaping and leading community culture.
By encouraging these core users to share their experiences, insights, and recommendations, we significantly enhance the community’s influence. Their words and actions often inspire interest and enthusiasm among other users, injecting vitality and momentum into the community.
Such authentic voices from within the community are more persuasive and appealing than any external advertisement.
In addition to approaching KOLs and active community members for promotional purposes, project managers can also incentivize them through tasks and rewards:
The design of reward mechanisms is a critical tool for user incentives, categorized into “Rewards per Invitee” and “Rewards by Tiers”. The straightforward “Rewards per Invitee” method provides instant feedback and maintains invitation motivation and positivity.
It allows operations managers to predict and control incentives more accurately, suitable for rapidly increasing user bases in the platform’s early stages. Conversely, the tiered reward system encourages continuous invitations and higher-tier rewards, promoting long-term user engagement.
Compared to immediate rewards per invite, tiered rewards require users to reach specific invitation thresholds for higher-tier rewards, motivating users with larger social networks to swiftly achieve higher tiers and bring higher-quality users.
Optimizing Products and Services, Streamlining Conversion Processes
Utilizing TaskOn’s data analytics system, we continuously optimize project products and services based on user feedback and in-depth data analysis.
With advanced data analytics dashboards, project operators can analyze participation conversion rates for each Task and Sprint in detail, tracking trends in user engagement changes. They can also monitor the specific performance of bots and invitation campaigns in real time through the Leaderboard feature, gaining comprehensive insights into overall community participation rates.
Retention
Level Program: Initial Setup of a User Loyalty System
As the community acquisition channels are established and user education content is completed, the community’s initial construction is on track. Community managers need to focus some of their efforts on building a user loyalty system. To cultivate a core user group, community managers can consider introducing a loyalty program. Many project managers turn user contributions into phased achievements.
In the early stages of a project, if time and resources are limited, community managers can use tools to set up the initial loyalty system. Many community solution platforms on the market can help community managers quickly establish a loyalty system, starting with a points system.
Reward users for their current actions with points that they can accumulate and redeem for future benefits, giving them something to look forward to. The primary goal of community building is to establish an active, supportive, and cohesive user group.
This is achieved by providing valuable content, resources, and interactive platforms that promote user communication and cooperation, ultimately leading to long-term user retention and contribution. The effectiveness of community building can be measured using indicators such as activity level, PMF (Product-Market Fit) usage rate, contribution level, and growth rate.
Activity level reflects user engagement, PMF usage rate shows how well the community product aligns with the market, contribution level measures users’ actual contributions to the community, and growth rate indicates the community’s attractiveness and user retention capability.
In different stages of a Web3 community, appropriate measures need to be taken to ensure its healthy development. In the initial stage, the focus is on content marketing, social media engagement, and promotional activities to build the community foundation and attract early users. In the growth stage, increasing activity and participation is achieved through user guidance, reward mechanisms, and community events.
In the mature stage, promoting community governance, transparent operations, and long-term value enhancement ensures the community’s sustainability and user loyalty.