Should I buy fake followers for my NFT/Web3 projects Twitter/Telegram accounts?

Founders often ask me if buying fake Twitter or Telegram followers makes sense for a new project; this is tricky to answer.

While it may seem like a tempting “quick fix”, it doesn’t build an underlying community that will purchase your token/NFT when you go live. However, nobody wants to be the first person to a party, so there is some merit in using a hybrid model.

I know of at least one VC that values the “vanity metrics” and expects to see at least twenty-five thousand followers on a Twitter account before they’ll even talk to a project. Hence the need to develop a hybrid model. I prefer to see five thousand actively engaged “real” people interested in the project rather than the vanity metrics model; this is a personal preference.

So assuming I was going to build a hybrid model for a project, what would I do?

Firstly, I would post one relevant, well thought out tweet a day to ensure I maximised impressions, reach, likes and retweets. Next, I would engage and tag larger projects within the same or relevant industries and hope they decided my tweets were good enough to quote or retweet. I would review my tweets weekly to see what was and wasn’t working and adjust accordingly; once I had built up a loyal and engaged following, I would run a competition to drive followers (I covered competitions in this previous blog).

Competition followers, especially if you promote it via a KoL (Key Opinion Leader) or use a paid-for service, are likely only to complete the required actions to enter the competition and never interact with the account again. Furthermore, they will often unfollow if they don’t win and the closing date has passed. So it would be best if you had an engaged audience before this to ensure you can carry the dead followers and not look like a spammy or fake profile. I never like to see a Twitter account with less than 0.25% engagement on tweets; it worries me and makes me consider if this is an actual project or simply false hype and a potential rug pull.

Any questions about this post? Reach out to me on Twitter.