Build NFT Community The Right Way — 6 Steps

Building a profitable and well-known NFT project is the dream of every NFT creator. However, the fact that you put a lot of work and creativity into the creation of your NFT doesn’t mean it will be well-received or get the attention it deserves.

Thus, the only way to make your NFT popular and have a lot of people mint or support it is by building a community around it. The community is a core factor in the making of any NFT project.

At this point, it’s noteworthy that building an NFT community is not as easy as it sounds. You might easily get discouraged or frustrated if you don’t know the strategies to use. 

Therefore, we will be examining actionable strategies you can use to build your NFT community and the common pitfalls you should avoid. 

6 Steps to build your NFT community 

Growing an NFT community is not rocket science. Hence, the reason you should be strategic about it. We have researched and analyzed some top NFT projects, most of them have these strategies in common:

1. Tell Your Story 

What inspired you to start your NFT collection? You should share the idea behind the project with people and explain it in detail. Convey the story of your NFT project in a way that will make it resonate with the values and interests of your target audience.    
Moreso, experts have confirmed that humans are easily attracted to a course or project with good storytelling.  Meanwhile, your story doesn’t have to be extremely dramatic. 

A good example is Samurai Sword – an NFT collection that has attracted over 80k followers on Instagram. The project tells a compelling story around the legacy of Samurai in Japanese history and how people can also “unleash the Samurai inside them” by owning an NFT of a Samurai sword. 

In addition, Dogs Unchained is an NFT project with its story around the enhancement of the welfare of dogs. The project’s story has attracted over 8k members to its Discord server and it has recorded a sale of almost 1,500 ETH on OpenSea – that is around $4,509,360. 

2. Choose The Right Platforms 

An NFT community must be built on a platform. Thus, the question is: What are the available options? How do you choose the right one? 

Telegram and Discord are two major channels where NFT communities get to interact. One of the reasons you can consider Telegram is because it is widely used by crypto projects. Therefore, you might want to leverage these communities. 

On the other hand, Discord might appear as a better option because you can arrange different topics and activities into channels for your discussions to be more structured. At the moment, a survey shows that more than 1,200 NFT projects are on Discord. 

Apart from Telegram and Discord, explore social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Instagram. However, we encourage you to research the social media platform that most of your target audience uses, then you double down on it. 

3. Engage Your Community Members 

Experience shows that community members are more passionate about a project when each of them is involved. Thus, make sure you always organize activities to carry your community members along with the progress of your project. 

You can organize AMA sessions, meet-ups, and parties for them to interact and talk about the project. 

Most times projects like Cool Cats NFT often use Twitter Spaces so even those who were not prior members can join the discussion – and eventually join the community. 

That said, one of the ways you can also engage your active members and give them a sense of belonging to the project is by allocating them roles like OG roles on your Discord server. 

4. Organize Quizzes and Giveaways 

One of the sure-fire strategies to build NFT community is to organize trivia for your members to attempt. It is better if most of the questions you ask relate to your project, that will act as a way of encouraging members who have been following your project.    
Before you do the quiz, make sure that you have been announcing it a week before the set date. This will help to enhance the number of participants. 

Outlaw Apes, an NFT project, is leveraging this as the project is giving its merch as freebies on Twitter. 

You should also bear in mind that you don’t need to break the bank with regards to what you’d give the winners as giveaways. You can simply offer whitelist spots or any other exclusive benefits. 

5. Real-life Utilities 

As an NFT creator, one question you must ask yourself is, what will people gain from buying my NFT? People will be more attracted to your project when your NFTs have real-life utilities. 

Using Bored Ape Yacht Club as a case study, even though its current floor price is 93 ETH, more people are still joining it because of the high net-worth social connection and IP ownership rights they can get from it. 

Last week, a new member of BAYC spent $267k to buy an Ape so he can have access to the IP ownership rights the community grants. He used these rights to build his restaurant, thereby leveraging the community’s popularity to market his restaurant to high-profile individuals. 

If you are a celebrity, one of the utilities of your NFTs to your fans might be having access to you. Recently, Binz—a Vietnamese musician—launched a tier of NFT with which his fans can have a private dinner with him. 

Similarly, you can link your NFT to tangible objects in real-life like real estate. Property DAO sells NFTs with underlying real estate property to its members. 

6. Collaborate With Like-minded Projects

You’d understand the power of synergy as you keep growing your NFT community. By collaborating with like-minded projects, you are also tapping into their communities and popularity. 

One of the most recent examples of this was how Adidas and Prada, two big fashion brands, merged forces as they launched a user-generated NFT collection. Adidas used this collection to reward the holders of its “Into The Metaverse” NFTs. 

In other news, Boredpuma—an NFT creative studio—recently sealed a deal with Splash – a sustainable fashion brand that has built a market presence in the Middle East since 1993. This enabled Boredpuma to leverage the presence of Splash in shipping its NFTs to a wider audience. 

5 Pitfalls To Avoid When Building An NFT Community 

When you’re starting your NFT community, you’d want to expect noticeable signs of growth as early as possible – thousands of people and conversations on your Discord server. But in doing this, you must avoid some booby traps:

1. Paying "Machineries" for Engagement 

To make the community look active, some NFT founders often hire some set of people to carry out fake engagement on their community channels; asking questions about the products and always commending the team. 

This approach might not generate results at the end of the day. At least, not every time. The best type of engagement is the organic one where the members by themselves spark off discussions about your NFT project. 

Most times, it is your members who will proceed to buy some items from your collection as a way of supporting the project - that's more sales for you. 

2. Drawing out a Generic or Unrealistic Roadmap 

A roadmap informs anyone about the direction of the community; its actionable goals for every milestone. This is often a plan that impresses people and makes them want to ape into your project. 

However, anyone in the NFT space would have noticed that some projects often draw quite impractical roadmaps or extremely generic ones. This is often a red flag that might get people disinterested in your project right from the start. 

Therefore, be sincere with your roadmap. Resist the urge to over-promise. 

3. Doing Everything By Yourself – Hire

You might be able to handle a lot of roles when you’re starting your NFT community; moderate the community, serve as the head of partnerships, and coordinate marketing. But that might become overwhelming when your community gets bigger. 

To avoid burnout and inefficiency, you should hire people for your team. Most importantly, you should hire a Moderator to coordinate the activities of the community. 

4. Not taking feedback from the community 

Although you are the NFT creator or “the owner” of the community, you should bear in mind that it doesn’t revolve around only you. For your community to move forward, you need to examine feedback from your members and look into the ones to implement. 

You should give your members a sense of belonging by considering their suggestions and observations. Moreso, since they’d be the eventual buyers of your NFTs, you should implement some of their suggestions so they’d be interested in your collection.

Using Fengu—a new Cardano-based NFT project—as a case study, the team behind the project opened a separate channel on their Discord server for members to air their suggestions. 

The implementation of this feedback has helped the project to get more members and supporters as it is approaching its mint period. 

5. Don't let your community members be too whitelist-minded 

While you might need to incentivize your active members with whitelist spots, you need to be careful so that doesn’t be the only reason they are active in your community. 

From your end, you should encourage organic engagements where members willingly make meaningful contributions towards the growth of the project and also maintain a lively atmosphere in the community. 

This works better than when you put benchmarks on the number of messages your members should send per day to secure a whitelist spot. 

Research has shown that when the community members are too whitelist-minded, they’d eventually mint the NFT, flip it at a higher price, and move out of the project. 

Bottom Line

We are sure you must have gained some insight into the practical steps you can take to grow your NFT community. More importantly, make sure you avoid the pitfalls early enough. 

That said, the next stage is to implement the strategies above by planning toward them. For example, plan the number of times you’d be having AMAs and Quizzes in a month. Similarly, start eyeing like-minded projects that might be good for collaboration.

You should bear in mind that every bit of your time invested in growing your NFT community is worth it. Therefore, you shouldn’t hesitate to go all out. 

Perhaps you are looking for the best NFT platform where you can start and grow your community, NFTify is the best choice. We provide you with enough tools for you to keep a closer connection with your supporters. 

Here are a few features to enhance your community-building efforts:

• whitelist feature to reward vibrant members of your community. 
• email subscription box to collect your members' mails and keep them informed. a 
• blog page to post educational content and press releases. 
• you can also send physical versions of your collectibles to your buyers.    
   

You can enjoy all these features and take your NFT community to the next level by setting up your storefront on NFTify today.

Go ahead & open your NFT stores via: http://nftify.network/   
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