What I have learned about Blockchain and cryptocurrency related influencers

I have done extense research for The imusify Team, and I will share what I’ve learned

After almost ten years of Bitcoin, the world has witnessed the creation and growth of many cryptocurrencies and the strength of the Blockchain based companies.

Since the historical peak in 2017, the cryptocurrencies have been attracting many professionals to this niche. I had my first experience this year, and I could notice it was slightly different from what I have done so far.

My first impression was that the crowdfunding vibe is more present in crypto-related projects and this “community” feeling is present among the startups, and, of course, the influencers.

I’ll share here my work process and some pieces of advice so you can find your north, specially pre-ICO, which is when you have to gather your community and build relationships.

Finding the influencers

Not like the regular influencers, who have a lot of exposure on front pages and trends on social network platforms, the crypto-related influencers are relatively niche, so you will have to find first a reliable database or website where you can gather the names. I would recommend CryptoDiffer and Hackernoon.

On YouTube, a search about cryptocurrencies can help you find some content. You can focus on a determined cryptocurrency to focus your search on what you want.

In my case, my focus was on NEO currency and people who have access both to crypto and music audiences.

Making a list

After a broad search, I ended up with around 150 influencers and started to analyze them, to see if they were influential. I noticed many of the influencers lists that I found online (Medium articles, blogs, websites) have recurrent names.

I used some tools to get to know their analytics, demographics, and relevance. Using the tools, I could separate who was, in fact, an influencer and who was starting and not yet influential.

My criteria were:

Good SEO

Number of followers

Estimated reach

Engagement (interactions)

Openness to work for an ICO

Let’s get more in-depth on my standards.

Good SEO

For websites and blogs, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a must-have. If you don’t organize your articles, if you don’t use wisely your keywords and if you don’t post your links on social media, then it is difficult to find you relevant.

For influencers, content is gold. And if you treat your gold like cheap fake jewelry, it will fade away. You have to take care of your content as much as you spend time creating it.

Using some great SEO tools like SEO PowerSuite, I could find the influencers who were less relevant to search engines and give them a low SEO score.

Number of followers

Some people are self-proclaimed influencers with a big follower base full of bots. Looking only at the followers’ number alone would be very naive. If they are niche, their follower base is relatively smaller.

My consideration for the number of followers was pretty simple, if they have less than 100 followers, let’s see who they are. If there are only family members and/or people who never posted before in their lives, something is not right.

An influential person has followers who like to interact, discuss or give a like. But followers are people too, and they have to interact with other content.

So when I saw a lack of interaction from followers in such a small audience, I gave those influencers a low follower base score.

Estimated reach

The number of people reached by a post or video from an influencer is always a percentage of the number of their total followers. When the influencer boosts their content, the reach tends to be bigger, extending to friends and acquaintances of their followers.

If an influencer is frequently going viral, they have the potential to reach a more significant number of people, since the algorithms recognize that this influencer has relevant content.

Using Airinfluencers, I calculated the reach of the influencers on my list to find out who of them would have a better impact. This data helped me score which ones have more engagement potential.

Engagement (interactions)

Engagement is not only about how many people clicked on or liked a post. It’s also about the shares and comments because they define whether the content is relevant or not.

My last scorable metric was engagement, which, combined with all other metrics I analyzed before, enabled me to give a final score to each influencer on my list.

I again used Airinfluencers to get information about their engagement rate and scores, and also did a manual analysis to get to the details about each influencer’s content and online presence.

After that, I just needed to filter the list of influencers for those who were open to working for an ICO.

Openness to work for an ICO

Not all crypto-influencers are willing to work for startups and/or currencies that are not yet established. And here is one important thing I learned: many of the influencers in this niche are entrepreneurs themselves.

In a market that is so new and yet so full of possibilities, many of the biggest crypto/Blockchain influential people run their own businesses or are part of a project, and they only accept working for specific types of project.

Many started their influencer careers because they wanted to promote their projects and couldn’t find people who could provide the communication they needed. So they did it themselves.

And for me, as a marketing professional, it was pretty new, since my experience with influencers taught me that a massive number of them needs help to become more professional.

In the crypto niche, they know what they are doing and most of them are professionals.

That said, I had almost to cut the list in half because plenty of the most influential people in the crypto world were not interested in an advertisement for new ICOs.

But they do say they will take a look at the project and, if they like it, they can write back.

Telegram

One of the most used tools among the cryptocurrency community, Telegram, does not have any official analytics tools yet. There are many bots, tough. But I haven’t found any bot that could tell me how many of the people in a group are reading, clicking or sharing the content. If you know how to run analytics on Telegram, I’m open for recommendations!

Every ICO project should have a group because it’s a fantastic way to improve your work, get closer to your community and also spread the message of your project.

By the way, The imusify Team Telegram group is here.

Community management

As important as having a group is to have a good number of admins to manage the community, inform them and protect them from scammers. We can’t forget we are talking about money when we are working on a cryptocurrency project.

Not only in the Telegram group but in all social media channels of an ICO project, community managers are the key points to keep the content buzzing and shielded against scammers at the same time.

When your audience knows where to find you, it’s going to be difficult to fool them into a scam.

My tl;dr

There are many crypto-related influencers out there, but you have to be careful because some of them are not influential;

You have to use tools to get metrics and data about the influencers before you hire them;

Many influencers will contact you, but you’ll have to check their analytics and channels because some of them are not fit for your brand;

Even in the niche of cryptocurrencies and Blockchain, many different approaches and side themes are relevant to decide whether the influencer is right or not for you;

There are countless scammers, and they will fool you into thinking they are specific influencers. Solution: if you can’t find the official contact channel of an influencer, then they are off the list;

Crypto-related influencers regularly have a similar modus operandi, which is accepting the advertisement agreement only after you convinced them your project is worth it;

The majority of them don’t accept tokens as payment.

Thank you for your time!