Limitations of Discord and Telegram: Optimizing Web3 Community Management

The cryptocurrency industry has been intricately tied to the community since its inception. In 2009, the Bitcoin network launched, followed by a Bitcoin forum in November of the same year. A community of like-minded individuals gathered to discuss Bitcoin's current state and future, providing a platform where Bitcoin could grow and become globally recognized.

In Bitcoin's early days, without the community of Bitcoin maximalists, could Bitcoin have survived until today?

The majority answer is likely: No.

Community building is deeply rooted in the underlying culture of Web3. A strong, active community can provide a stable user base, technical support, and market promotion, thereby driving the long-term development and growth of projects. The project's story begins with the community and is sustained by it, expanding through community engagement.

As time has progressed, communities have moved from early forums to platforms like Telegram and Discord.

• Telegram's instant messaging provides a space for project teams and community members to communicate and interact. Through Telegram, project teams can release updates, engage with community members, and conduct AMA sessions.

• From 2020 to 2021, Discord has gradually been adopted by DAO/NFT projects, expanding the audience for community building in the Web3 space. Today, almost all Web3 projects have their own communities on Discord. Discord channels allow project teams to establish discussion topics. The introduction of Discord Roles enables project teams to quickly engage users and reward active participants and contributors with special recognition or specific community privileges.

From forums to Telegram and now Discord, the landscape of community platforms continues to evolve, driving advancements in Web3 community management.

So, what does the future hold for community management? Can we anticipate trends and prepare accordingly?

We can use the limitations currently observed in Discord and Telegram as a starting point.

Limitations of Discord & Telegram

Disconnect between SNS and Web3 Addresses

Community managers on platforms like Telegram and Discord often struggle to link community member accounts to their corresponding Web3 addresses. This disconnect means that efforts invested in growing community size, increasing daily active users, and accumulating chat histories on SNS platforms may not translate effectively into tracking and supporting active addresses on the blockchain. This mismatch results in resources not optimally allocated to where Web3 users actually depend—their active addresses.

High Churn Rate

Transitioning community members from platforms like Telegram and Discord to project product pages often involves a high churn rate. Each step requiring users to switch platforms increases the risk of losing them. Multi-step operations diminish user experience, significantly impacting sustained engagement and loyalty. Issues such as loading times, login problems, or technical hurdles during platform transitions may prompt users to abandon their actions altogether.

Data Silos

Telegram, Discord, and similar platforms are primarily designed for chat discussions and lack robust data processing capabilities. This results in isolated data silos where user data across platforms is not interoperable. Consequently, these platforms struggle to analyze user behavior or establish multi-dimensional user profiles comprehensively. The inability to integrate and analyze data across platforms and regions limits community managers' ability to gain a holistic view of user behavior and interactions. This data silo effect hinders data-driven decision-making and undermines the efficiency and effectiveness of community management efforts.

Future Trends in Crypto Community Management

Bridging the Gap from Isolation to Collaboration

To address these challenges, the future trend in community management involves bridging the gap between SNS accounts and Web3 addresses. This approach aims to help community managers accurately manage and identify active users, thereby enabling more targeted resource allocation.

The TaskOn platform facilitates this by bridging SNS accounts and Web3 addresses, integrating user SNS account information and Web3 addresses into a unified platform. This integration allows for seamless interaction when completing tasks, automatically fetching corresponding account details.

To pinpoint active users more precisely, community managers also need the capability to view detailed account information, including both SNS profiles and Web3 addresses.

Setting up a loyalty-based points system makes it easier to filter high-loyalty users.

Loyalty Management

By establishing a points-based level system and incentive structure, you can effectively encourage continuous user participation and interaction, thereby enhancing user loyalty. Community managers quantify each user's engagement directly through numerical values, monitoring community dynamics.

For more information about building a Points-based Level System and Benefit Shop, please refer to these tutorials: The Impact of Points Systems on Web3 Project Growth and Engagement & How to Build Incentive System.

Through the points-based level system and incentive mechanisms, you can effectively mobilize user participation and activity across all channels. Utilizing TaskOn Community's Member List feature, projects can gain detailed insights into user account information across major platforms such as official websites, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, etc., breaking down data barriers between platforms and promoting data interoperability and conversion.

Using TaskOn Community's Analytics feature, projects can delve into user conversion rates across various tasks. This data analytics provides valuable insights for projects to formulate precise operational strategies and incentive measures, thereby enhancing user stickiness and participation across all channels.

Data Analysis

Community managers can intuitively understand user activity and participation, enabling them to develop more precise operational strategies. For example, managers can monitor real-time user task completion, engagement levels, and interaction frequencies through platform backends, accurately identifying core and potential active users.

Focus on Consensus

By leveraging tools, community managers can free themselves from the tedious task of answering user questions, allowing them to devote more energy to guiding discussions on project usage, product value, and uniqueness. This shift helps steer community discussions from excessive focus on asset-centric topics towards deeper and broader explorations of project visions.  

Community managers can foster consensus through frequent, in-depth discussions to clarify the project's mission, product value, and uniqueness. Simultaneously, they can diversify promotional approaches to highlight project advantages and actively gather user feedback to improve and optimize project shortcomings. Emphasizing the project's decentralized nature, managers can encourage a culture of collaborative creation, construction, sharing, and governance among users, a key strategy to achieve these goals. 

This approach not only enhances community members' understanding and identification with the project but also promotes deeper and more meaningful participation, driving the project towards a healthier and more sustainable development path.

Community development evolves accordingly. Seizing these community development trends means seizing the users' attention.

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