While X has been the go-to crypto social network for years, its increasing noise, scam, and negativity are driving brands and individuals to seek alternatives. Farcaster emerges as the most promising one.
What is Farcaster?
Farcaster is a sufficiently decentralized social network built on Ethereum. Users can create profiles, post short messages or "casts", follow others and organize into communities. Since Farcaster is public and decentralized, anyone can build an app to read and write data. Users own their accounts and relationships with other users and are free to move between different apps.
Warpcast is the most popular client. In January 2024, there are 8.5k DAU (vs 1.5k in 2023). The majority of active accounts are builders, founders, and crypto-natives.
Farcaster is the right place to:
Find early users and beta testers
Collaborate and build relationships within the crypto community
Search for potential hires
Access VC
Where to start?
Personal vs Brand Account
Both. Regardless of being a solo founder, a small startup, or a large company, representing your brand is important. Farcaster is still the size of a small city, and personal interactions are highly valued. A brand account, lacking authenticity, will fade in the feed. It's still useful for sharing updates or running bots about new sales or publications.
Tip: Supercast is the best client for managing multiple accounts.
Brand Channel
Anyone can create a channel for a small fee. A branded channel is where you engage with your audience – sharing updates, providing support, discussing ideas, showing WIPs, collaborating, and experimenting. By design, there are no suggested casts in channels. This allows to build stronger relationships without competing for attention in the general feed. Ensure your branded channel is well moderated – hide unrelated content, respond quickly, and encourage genuine conversations.
/Zora and /Base are currently the most active branded channels (source: channels dashboard on flink).
Principals
Value & Idea Promotion > Brand Promotion
Aggressive marketing won't work well. The value/noise ratio is much higher than on other social media. You don't need to be loud to be heard. Focus on providing value, promoting ideas, educating; let people have fun (or just make them money).
Active Participation
Engage in relevant conversations beyond your channel. With the current algorithm, posting in channels helps with discovery. /founders and /product are good starting points. If you're building on /Base or /Optimism, introduce yourself and your brand there.
Tip: @manan and @rish built a tool to get notified when your brand is mentioned on Farcaster.
Build in Public
This is the unofficial mantra of the community and a proven way to keep people interested and emotionally invested in what you're doing. Take the community on a ride with you: provide frequent and consistent updates, talk about the unknown details, share lessons and struggles, test in prod, ask for feedback, and, most importantly, ship.
Related read: "Why you should build your product in public" by Ryan Hoover, 2014
Unique Content
Avoid reposting threads with excessive emojis from X. The audience deserves original or adapted content. Provide clear and precise updates, engage in two-way conversations and dialogues, add a pinch of memes. Working with UGC (user-generated content) should be a part of your strategy.
Summary
You must build your own distribution to avoid distortion. - Balaji
Facaster is a growing protocol laser-focused on growing its qDAU. Brands that are able to consistently provide engaging and valuable content are positioned to grow with the protocol. Adapting your strategy to Farcaster's culture is key; there are no shortcuts to building trust and reputation. It's a process that requires time, genuine effort, and strategy. But as a result, you're joining a community of thoughtful individuals who care. Each new connection, idea, and dialogue is an opportunity to contribute to the industry's growth.
Do's:
Represent the brand through the team.
Bring value to the community.
Share and advocate for unique ideas and perspectives.
Engage in conversations.
Build in public.
Maintain consistent and authentic presence.
Don'ts:
Use only general brand accounts.
Aggressive marketing tactics like giveaways/airdrops.
Recycled content from X.
Ignore the culture.
A few good examples of brands and founders that are already active on Farcaster.
Brands
Founders
