This is Testnet, where crypto-native marketing and growth experiments are tested live. Every week I review an aspect of a crypto brand's marketing strategy.
There's a lot of advice out there on how to 0 to 1 your business. Even on how to 0 to 1 your marketing.
But how do you 0 to 1 your brand's social media on crypto twitter?
The hardest part of social media management is the beginning. Building your audience can feel like watching grass grow. Every day can feel like posting into the void, or sending a radio broadcast into outer space. It's hard, it's demoralizing, it's tedious.
And the toughest part is, there's no playbook to copy. Different styles work for different accounts.
How do you grow a brand account on CT quickly?
This week: Looking at some tactics that a new product, Untitled, is testing to build up their account from zero.
Untitled: growing a brand account from scratch
Untitled is a new onchain social platform with a focus on contrarian takes. A blank Title message is auctioned over a 48 hour period, and the winner of the auction gets to write it. That message is the front page of the Untitled platform and is also posted on Twitter. Users can reply to the message and collect the content. It's a way for people/projects with opinions to cut through the noise and blast them out into the world. (More on the product here.)
What I'm interested in today is less so on the product side, and more on how you can approach building up the audience for a consumer product from scratch. Untitled is brand new, with just over 1k followers. How are they working to grow it into a CT sensation?
Let's explore some tactics they're using, so you can try them for your project:
The Ratio
One of the best methods to appear on potential users' feeds is to ratio people your target user is likely to follow.
A ratio is when you post a reply or quote tweet that does better numbers (likes, replies, comments) than the main tweet itself. Spicy replies, for example, often garner more attention than the vanilla-content posted by itself.
Here, Untitled is reposting a potential spicy take from Ryan Sean Adams that could be shared on their social platform:
Unpopular opinion:
ETH is money.
ETH is money.
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Ratio-ing is a way to hack the algo and appear on new viewers' timelines. But it's hard to do! Getting a good ratio in is rare, so the more tries you take, the better chance you have. Some tips:
Identify accounts that your target audience follows / respects.
Create a list of those accounts.
Check the list every day for ideas to try to quote or comment on and achieve a ratio.
The founder account
Another great way to grow a new brand account is through a founder account. If the founder already has an audience, people are more likely to connect to the new product through the founder and their personality than the new product.
It's easier to connect with people than with products or ideas. Founder accounts can do a lot of heavy-lifting for the new brand.
Here's an example of Untitled leveraging a meme posted on the founder account on their own timeline:
Soon on Untitled
Me absolutely cooking with the @0xUntitled contracts.
The founder account content works by:
Tapping into the founder's audience and bringing them on to the brand account
Showing the builder behind the brand and putting a human face to the name.
The spicy brand voice
Untitled is also experimenting with a spicier brand voice, which matches their product's contrarian takes. Here's an example:
Oh, so you want to avoid reading anything Spice-related on #Untitled? Well, that's Fine.
Our AI's got your back. No Spice for you.
#OwnTheDay
Our AI's got your back. No Spice for you.
#OwnTheDay
The spicy brand voice works by:
Drawing in people's attention, a.k.a. stopping the scroll!
Showing that their account will be a good follow and entertaining down the line
Which method do you prefer? Let me know on twitter!
Marketing tidbit: people do judge a book by its cover
I came across this Apple marketing philosophy from 1977 and really enjoyed all three components of the marketing philosophy. Take a look:
The phrase, "People DO judge a book by its cover" really stood out to me. If you don't consider how your products/service are wrapped, whether in physical or digital packaging, you are not likely to land the customers that you're seeking.
The product presentation is the marketing. It's absolutely critical that the first touchpoint a customer sees, whether that's the website home page or twitter account, are polished and in line with your target user's desires.
Think: what's the book cover of my product? And what's the story it's telling to my target user?
Of course, different products have different target markets and will therefore need different "front covers." Exhbit A:
This is the website for the largest ethereum block builder:
This week's vibe: social connection is healing for the soul
Busy weekend with lots of time with friends I haven't seen in ages.
This week's vibe is recovering, relaxing, and feeling full of good summer vibes. These are the weekends that make me want to throw my phone out the window and go IRL forever. Would it be so hard?
Here's a vegetable dinner we cooked:
See you next week!
❤️ Sam
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Back with a fresh edition of our weekly digest where we hand-pick some of our favorite posts over the past month-ish.
First up, @jackson dives into the topic of "taste" in a world of overwhelming abundance of choices in consumption and creation. Jackson emphasizes that true taste arises from prolonged attention, skill, and personal expression, suggesting that slowing down and immersing yourself deeply into your interests leads to richer experiences and better quality in both consumption and creation. https://paragraph.xyz/@jd/taste-time-attention
Next, the @variant team — @jesse @li @alanadlevin @derekmw23 @gham1lt0n — take stock of what the rest of 2024 will hold and what we might see heading into 2025, highlighting the trends and ideas that will shape the next wave of crypto development. https://blog.variant.fund/things-excited-about-crypto
@patwater reviews The Dawn of Everything, using it as a canvas to explore the potential to pioneer new modes of living, working, and playing with the third wave of the web. "Graeber and Wengrow show over and over again how many aspects of human societies weren’t structurally determined but instead reflected conscious choices of the participants. The book shows how today, like every day before and every day thereafter, we as humans have that same choice, if we have courage to look upon the world with wonder once again and see the dawn with new eyes." https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/rewilding-civilization-david-graebers-radical-vision-in-the-dawn-of-everything
Amazing to read all this! Love the concept of what you’re doing here.
Love to hear it, thank you! 🙏