AL #019: The biggest mistake Founders make on social media

It's not a numbers game.

I recently spoke to a Founder who tried to outsource crypto social marketing by partnering with a “degen influencer”.

It didn't go as hoped.

The collaboration attracted the wrong type of customer and diluted the brand.

This can be an easy mistake to make – I still get many inbound DMs offering paid repost services and other ways to inflate follower numbers.

So I wanted to explain why it's a very bad idea.

It starts with the numbers we see

While “Followers” is the #1 metric that is shown on your personal or brand's profile, it can be very misleading.

1000 quality followers are better than 100,000 followers looking for an airdrop.

Feedback from 100 followers is better than engagement from 10,000.

Organic endorsement from 10 highly reputable followers is better than a retweet from a 1000 bad ones.

And 1 good investor will get you more revenue than 100 token holders.

The best followers:

• Are natural target users of your product

• Can offer intelligent feedback and are excited to co-develop with you

• Enjoy getting to know you as a person

• Have the means to buy your product/service

• BONUS: The best followers already have audiences that would be natural users of your product too.

“Engagement” is another misleading metric.

Loopify said it best:

Our bias of seeing numbers leads us to try to optimize them.

But engagement itself should not be the goal, especially if:

• It does not lead to new followers

• It does not lead to the right type of followers.

The myth of follower count legitimacy

“OK, I get it, I need quality followers eventually. But no one will follow me if I only have 200 followers.”

Clients have asked me whether they should buy the first 1000 followers to kickstart the legitimacy of their account.

The answer is almost certainly no.

First of all, if your account has over 1000 followers and your tweet gets 0 engagement, to the discerning user, you now look even less legitimate.

Following a high quality brand with a small number (200-300) of followers can actually be exciting to the right person (like finding a project in the earliest stages).

Second, content determines everything.

Your ability to convert followers is much less to do with the number that is currently on your profile and much more to do with the content itself and your bio.

Trust me, I've written tweets that led to 20 people unfollowing and I've written tweets that lead to 500 new followers.

The goal is not to get to a certain number of followers.

The goal is to discover the types of content that will attract the right followers.

You don't need much to get started with that.

So what can we do to maintain follower quality and fit?

Step 1: Be very intentional about your target customer

The more clear & narrow you can be about your target customer, the easier it will be to attract the right followers.

Don't worry about attracting investors.

Don't worry about attracting “potential affiliates”.

Don't worry about attracting “good people to know in crypto”.

Start by narrowly defining your ideal customer and committing to speak to them directly.

(Counter-intuitively, you’ll still attract investors, hires and other people, potentially at a higher rate than if you were less focused.)

Step 2: Engage with people who your target customer follows

Next, find the people who are already followed by your ideal customer.

I wrote more about the concept of a “Dream 100” list in a previous newsletter:

AL #008: Overcome ignorance debt and learn to value distribution

You want to do this for a few reasons:

• It will give you ideas for content that attracts that type of follower

• You can engage & make friends with these people over time as they likely share similar obsessions

• You can support each other.

Step 3: Make an opinionated profile

Now, write a profile that will selectively appeal to your ideal follower.

For me, I put the free https://www.revenuebeforetokens.com course in my bio because this tagline is self-selecting.

It’s going to upset people that think crypto companies should be DAOs from Day 1.

And it’s going to welcome people that are looking to generate revenue for their crypto product.

Step 4: Make content that attracts / repels

Finally, your content has to work the same way as your profile.

Both attracting your ideal customer and repelling one that isn't.

Here's a couple of ways I try to do this:

• I’ll put “Founder” or “Operator” in the content to clarify the target audience. I'm not writing for investors, traders or other personas. Now, they may still enjoy the content and also some of the learnings can carry over to different domains but that's a fortuitous side effect, not the goal (I did it for this newsletter too).

• When I speak about protocols, I always analyze them from the Founder's perspective. As tempted as I am to incorporate my perspectives as user, I focus on distilling protocols in terms of the opportunities they create or the methodologies and ideas used in building them. This allows me to “trend hack” in a way that’s useful to the audience.

• I communicate clear and polarizing points of view, whether it’s “Revenue Before Tokens”, the fact that Founders should tweet, the idea that crypto UX should be simplified enough for regular users, etc.

This is an example tweet which was not talking about Jack Butcher's NFTs from a buyer perspective but instead talking about collection architecture:

In terms of results – I've gotten more positive feedback from this newsletter than from two other newsletters I wrote previously which each had over 50 (!) issues but were less focused.

It’s worked well for me and has justified leaning into this strategy more.