Effective community management, especially on Telegram, is a must-have for any crypto project. It’s one of the chief attributes that investors and exchanges pay attention to. In this article we have decided to share with you some fundamental principles that we applied to organically grow our client’s Telegram community from 1,300 to approximately 22,000 members in 6 months.

Please note that for legal reasons we cannot disclose any names or other confidential information.

1. Defining “community management”

The difference between a social media manager and a community manager is that the latter is mostly responsible not for publishing content on different platforms, but for interacting with communities. How did we engage with the members of our client’s Telegram community? The same way you do it in real life: by asking questions. First of all, it helped us to trigger lengthy discussions and get people to speak out. Second of all, it was a good way to obtain feedback from the community and see what thoughts, ideas, and complaints they had.

2. Spurring involvement through (limited) crowdsourcing

We also did our best to actively involve both the existing members and first-time users in the life of the community. The most efficient way to do that was to reach out to our membership to ask for their help and input, in ways that allowed everyone to make a contribution — for example, to report any bug that they had encountered or to come up with an idea for the project’s new Twitter design. Rather quickly lots of members of the community were becoming deeply invested in the project because to some extent it was now theirs as well. They could actually see the fruits of their work. The important part of that process was to not forget to thank people for their effort and assistance; being noticed and appreciated always generates motivation to keep doing great things. Sometimes we organized competitions, which added even more excitement to the process.

3. Warming over an old idea

The idea of finding brand ambassadors is, of course, not as old as the hills, but has been around in the world of marketing for a long while. In the classic sense, a brand ambassador is a person, often a celebrity, who is paid to promote a particular company or product. Our approach was a little bit different: we tried to build strong bonds with the community members and thus gradually found brand ambassadors within the community itself. The results exceeded our expectations. For instance, on several occasions participants of the community stepped forward to represent the project at a conference in some faraway place, where we wouldn’t have been able to take part otherwise.

4. Local chats

One more positive outcome of establishing good connections with the community was that some proactive members asked for our authorization to start separate local non-English communities and become their leaders. We would always support such initiatives. First of all, it wasn’t a lot of toil: all we needed to do was create a new chat and establish a community policy. Second of all, it allowed us to achieve a wider and more diverse audience.

5. Keep it tidy

Finally, it was essential to have bots that deleted spam and blocked users who posted it. Keeping all the chats free of annoying ads and other unwanted posts helped prevent the current members from getting distracted and left first-time users with a favorable general impression.

Final Thoughts

Community management is all about building up a strong relationship with members. If you invest time and energy into strengthening that connection, your community will reciprocate in unexpected ways.