ICO community management. Why it’s so important? Helpful tips for your project.

Your community is constantly growing, new people show up in Telegram channel, and a daily number of questions counts in tens? Congratulations! You managed to create hype around your project. Now, the most important thing is to maintain and multiply this interest, and gain the community support. And from now on you’ll need a skilled community-manager and experienced support team.

Why do I need a community manager (CM)?

While the community of your project is growing, you will begin to receive a lot of various questions in all your social media channels. There sure will be many tricky ones and wittingly negative from competitors, scammers or just trolls. The thing is, there may be a potential investor behind any of these questions, and it’s for your own good to answer every one of them. Reaction speed, expertise, competence and focus on customers — all these factors may be crucial for your potential investors to make a decision about your ICO. And this works not only for those asking these questions but for every person following the discussion.

“There may be a potential investor behind every question coming from your community, and it’s for your own good to answer every one of them.”

Let’s discuss main duties CM and his team are responsible for. Here is the list of most important tasks:

• Maintain continuous communication with your community on all main channels and social networks.
• Give quick answers to incoming questions and requests.
• Promptly react to conflicts and different problematic situations.
• Deal with negative comments and maintain positive and friendly climate.
• Intensify, promote and evolve community.

Content manager and support team are crucial for growing ICO project.

Necessary skills for community managers and where to find the right people.

Usually, it’s not a big deal for founders and executives to maintain communications by themselves and answer incoming questions at the early ICO stages. But there will be almost impossible to handle your subscribers without a special team when your community grows. That’s why you should find good community manager(s) beforehand and delegate them this task.Let’s see what professional skills they should possess and where you can find such specialists:

• Depending on the scale of your project, you’ll need from 2 to 5 people in your community team.
• Try to hire people from different time zones or countries to provide 24/7 support.
• Fluent English is necessary for everybody, but there will be the win-win situation to add some people with Chinese, Korean, etc. languages besides English.
• Your CM and support team should have knowledge in blockchain and cryptocurrency spheres as well as deep understanding of your project.
• The best situation if you’ll manage to find people with experience in managing ICO communities. Try to get some recommendations from other projects.
• You should start searching for candidates in specialized Telegram channels (ibcghr for example). Also, traditional headhunting websites should do (upwork.com for example).
• Also, there is a good idea to keep an eye on active members of your community or efficient participants of your bounty program. You can find skilled people among them by chance.

“Your CM and support team should have knowledge in blockchain and cryptocurrency spheres as well as deep understanding of your project.”

At first sight, it may seem that the main CM task is to answer community questions. But not less important is to stimulate discussions by yourself. One of the main thing is to prepare FAQ in advance and constantly update it. Most of the questions often repeated and manager should find common answers quick.To maintain high activity in your channels, you should feed them with interesting information: fresh news, articles, reviews, etc. Create internal chat with CM and support team to provide the required information: new details about your project, any updates you want to share with the community. Community managers should know all news first-hand! It’ll help to plan communication, highlight positive news and prepare for a negative reaction if such will appear. By the way, speaking about negative and haters. Do not ignore haters. Handle their comments correctly. Your task is not to make haters to change their minds but to convince people in the chat that the truth is on your side.

"Do not ignore haters. Your task is not to make haters to change their minds but to convince people in the chat that the truth is on your side."

Main channels of communication.

Like many handed Shiva, community manager exists in all your communication channels ready to react. Let’s see where to expect the biggest amount of questions and comments:

• Telegram is undisputed leader nowadays. It’s a great idea to create two separate channels. One is for project’s news and updates and the other for general discussions. Thus you can be sure, that all your announcements won’t lost in flood.
• Chat-widget on your site or landing page (Zendesk, Intercom, Jivosite, etc.). Many ICO projects usually ignore that tool, but it better not to. This tool is not so interactive as Telegram but very convenient for quick answers (you can use predetermined templates), and it allows to redirect messages to other team members. It’s a good way to communicate with customers, who became interested in crypto recently.
• Twitter is your number one social channel for broadcasting to the world-wide community.
• Due to its wide functionality for post-sharing, commenting and reposting to various crypto-oriented groups, Facebook is the most popular network for bounty program participants.
• And last, but not least — Email. Don’t forget about it. There you may receive messages from would-be investors. Check it regularly.

If you’ll follow these basic rules and advice you find community management as an effective tool for attracting new investors and platform users.