06.07.2024

Gleb Specter

16 min

RELATED

Web3 moves fast. 1 day here is like a whole week in traditional markets, if not several weeks.

Because there are so many critical thinkers and disruptive ideas, web3 marketing has naturally become the hub of social media-driven growth innovations.

Blockchain token-leveraging GTMs (or go-to-market strategies) are continually emerging to engage users and build communities.

One such strategy that has been making waves is X social farming (formerly Twitter) where users earn off-chain points by engaging with content related to a web3 project.

These points can potentially lead to an airdrop of the project's native tokens once it launches, creating a win-win scenario for both users and projects.

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Projects gain visibility and traction, while community members contribute to their growth and earn rewards in return.

Look at the example tweet here by Xterio, a free-to-play-and-own game developer and publisher, that motivates web3 enthusiasts to interact with their X account and those mentioning it as well as post about the project using their $XTER ticker. All in plain text.

Emphasizing the task to mention $XTER here builds a strong X presence for the ticker due to multiple people tagging it continuously, making it more easily searchable and discoverable for those not familiar with the product yet.

Social farming involves users performing various activities such as posting, liking, and sharing content related to a blockchain project on X.

In return, they earn points that place them on a leaderboard.

The higher their rank, the greater their chances of receiving an airdrop of the project's native tokens.

This method has enormous potential for web3 projects to capture the attention of the broader community, ultimately resulting in successfully achieving growth milestones.

Web3 projects use platforms like Zealy, Galxe, TaskOn, claimr⚡️, and others to involve their communities in social farming and create sprints of gamified tasks and quests for users who earn off-chain participation XP or points towards on-chain rewards like native tokens, stablecoins, or NFTs.

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This strategy helps build active and loyal communities, promoting the project’s growth.

Memecoins often apply straightforward social farming right on X, bypassing community engagement platforms altogether, at least at the outset of their operations.

The concept here is simple: users are invited to like, retweet, and engage with a specific post for a possibility of an additional airdrop allocation.

In essence, users can both engage in the presale, securing a portion of tokens, and simultaneously interact with the project’s X account through these dedicated posts.

By liking, retweeting, and commenting on these posts, users can earn additional airdrop tokens or other on-chain benefits from the memecoin project.

One great example of this is the $ROOST token launched on the Base L2 blockchain this March.

Check out their tweets above. Before their presale, $ROOST encouraged everyone to retweet and drop their wallets under the post for a chance to get a “mystery 🥚 chance”.

You can imagine that some soft of point system must have been involved here, with the $ROOST team keeping tabs on those who interacted with the tweets in question.

This strategy effectively generated substantial hype and engagement around the post and the project overall, with numerous users retweeting and jumping into the comments section.

As a result, this boosted their visibility on X at the crucial moment right before their presale launch.

X social farming isn’t to be confused with, at best, questionable engagement farming, which is typically associated with low-quality, attention-grabbing messages like “retweet this post and drop a comment to win half a $SOL.”

These tactics, often employed by dubious accounts, recently have been criticized even by X owner, Elon Musk, himself who has vowed to reduce their visibility and impact.

Social farming, on the other hand, involves increasingly more quality projects that are building something tangible in web3. They utilize specialized platforms (Zealy, Galxe, TaskOn, etc.) to promote meaningful social media activity. The aim is to spread the word about their initiatives and let the community embrace them through genuine interaction.

Elon Musk’s crackdown on low-quality engagement farming paves the way for high-quality projects to thrive. By rooting out spammy, low-effort content, it clears the road for projects that deserve attention.

This enables web3 projects to effectively use X social farming to build strong and engaged communities.

Despite its potential, users can encounter some challenges while participating in social farming. Some products like Cookie3 are actively trying to tackle.

We took a deep look at it in the next section of the article.

So far, points allocation approaches applied by web3 projects have frequently favored users with larger followings, who can generate more points through their extensive reach.

This creates a disparity where smaller accounts struggle to compete, usually resulting in spamming or botting as users attempt to gain points through sheer volume of posts and other engagement.

Moreover, the quality of content can suffer, leading to timelines filled with repetitive and low-value interactions.

Addressing inefficiencies and unfairness in social farming, some projects are leveraging AI and advanced analytics, and Cookie3 is a standout example of one.

Cookie3 is insights-driven platform designed to aggregate and analyze on-chain, in-platform, and social data.

The platform’s AI-powered MarketingFi ecosystem helps filter out bots and malicious actors, ensuring genuine user engagement is rewarded. By examining both on-chain and off-chain behaviors, these tools provide accurate assessments of user contributions, fostering a balanced and effective social farming environment.

This setup aims to achieve two major goals for incentivized communities on X and other social media: enhancing the quality of interactions and ensuring the fair distribution of rewards.

By leveraging AI and blockchain's transparency, Cookie3 is building a more equitable and efficient social farming model.

Web3 projects are finding clever ways to utilize airdrops and social farming to boost community engagement.

Using token mentions on X, some projects hit a home run with their marketing campaigns.

By initiating token airdrops for tweets, retweets, quotes, replies, and likes on posts mentioning their tokens, these projects succeeded in keeping the community actively engaged.

One remarkable example is BlockGames, which introduced Social Points that are earned through X social activity.

The process is straightforward: users download the BlockGames App, sign up, and link their X account.

By tagging $BLOCK or @getblockgames in their tweets or engaging with posts mentioning BlockGames, users can earn the Social Points.

The higher the engagement their posts receive, the more points they accumulate. These points are automatically added to users' accounts weekly based on their activity. Incentivizing social media activity, this also kept the community actively involved in the lead-up to BlockGames' TGE (Token Generation Event), which took place April 12.

BlockGames' campaign has proven highly effective, with almost 3,000,000 sign-ups for the app to date and significant community participation.

BlockGames amassed almost 900,000 followers on X as well, reinforcing the effectiveness of the social farming model.

Portal Coin also effectively used social farming through its Crystal Dash promotion.

Users earned Crystal Dash points by creating and engaging with X content about Portal. The more viral the content, the more points earned.

Here's a brief Crystal Dash:

• Original tweets mentioning @Portalcoin and engagement with select tweets earned points.
• Points helped users level up, with higher levels granting shards.
• Shards could be fused into crystals, which translated into $PORTAL airdrop tokens.

To participate, users must visit http://crystaldash.co, connect their Twitter account, and ensure their account is older than 3 months with over 100 followers.

As a result, Portal Coin’s X account has reached over 356,000 followers so far.

Yet another great example of social farming can be seen with the LimeWire project where users earn points by tagging @limewire or using the $LMWR ticker in their posts.

These points accumulate, positioning users on a leaderboard, and those in the top ranks qualify for an airdrop of the $LMWR token.

Initially, it might seem easy to climb the leaderboard with a few posts, but as more participants join, the competition intensifies, requiring more significant effort to stay ahead.

X social farming is a powerful tool if leveraged thoughtfully: the main advice here is to that your blockchain-powered project has to have a great value prop that will justify holding the token once you have achieved your pre-launch objectives in terms of community engagement and funds secured.

That’s a simple investor mindset at play here: people will hold your token as long as they believe the project will be delivering in the future and is worth sticking with even beyond the drop. Not to mention that your token needs meaningful utility besides rewards, as otherwise, when it has served as a reward distribution vehicle, its price will inevitably drop.

X social farming offers benefits to both the project and its community of early supporters.

While it may face challenges, particularly regarding fairness and content quality, advancements in AI and analytics promise to enhance its effectiveness.

As web3 continues to grow, social farming already plays a crucial role in building engaged communities around blockchain-integrated projects and in securing visibility leading to funding (both crowd and private).

Ready to take your project to the next level? Cryptorsy has you covered!

Our Web3 marketing studio specializes in X social farming, securing millions of impressions for our BUIDLer clients.

With our arsenal of social farming insights partner platforms like Cookie3 and claimr⚡️, we ensure your project gets maximum exposure.

Contact us today, and let’s give your project some bullish vibes together.