Why Crypto AMA Sessions Should Be a Key Part of Your Marketing Plan
Crypto projects having a ton of success lately have one thing in common — they prioritize community building. A happy community means users have a great relationship with the project team and will stick around even when the going gets tough in bear markets.
However, it’s not as easy as it sounds to build a strong bond with a community in the crypto world. Marketers must pursue different strategies to connect with community members to answer queries and educate them on the latest project developments. One such strategy proving to be effective is conducting AMA sessions.
Ask Me Anything, or AMA, is a popular marketing trend where a community and group of experts have an interactive discussion about a specific topic. AMA sessions have been resourceful for crypto projects because they provide a medium to show transparency and keep users in the loop of what’s happening behind the scenes.
While a crypto AMA session follows a simple question-and-answer format, you still need to figure out how and where you’ll host these sessions to drive maximum community impact. This article will cover everything you need to know to drive value consistently through AMAs and make it a key part of your marketing plan.
What Does AMA Mean in Crypto
Ask Me Anything (AMA) is a marketing medium used by top experts and teams to connect with the public and answer their questions regarding the project. In crypto, AMAs hold great significance because the community comes first in any project. So it’s crucial to distribute up-to-date information to the community in the most transparent manner possible.
AMA sessions also help you filter misleading information and find valuable info before the masses catch on to it. As AMAs allow speaking with project leaders, it gives you a sense of where things are going regarding growth in the blockchain space. This can help you spot red flags, change your investment thesis, or strengthen your long-term conviction in a project.
In the earlier days, AMAs used to be foreign for a professional setup, and only celebrities used them to connect with their fan base. But, in the crypto space, it has become a standard for projects to maintain regular and direct communication with community members.
Benefits of Conducting AMA Sessions for Crypto Projects
Any marketing effort aimed toward community engagement has its set of benefits. In the case of a crypto AMA session, the benefits may not directly correlate with growth or returns in any form.
But AMA sessions do impact intangibles like brand recognition in the long term. Some of the benefits of conducting AMA sessions are given below:
Unlocks Two-Way Communication
It is rare in a corporate landscape for CEOs and Founders to interact with communities on a public forum. So it has always been a one-way street where only the company can share their opinion, and users can’t give any feedback. This is not the case in the crypto space.
From the get-go, crypto projects maintain consistent communication with their users and supporters. This helps teams identify what’s missing in their product and what needs to improve. On the other hand, users can finally voice their opinion and get their queries answered.
Such an open feedback loop between communities and cryptocurrency project’s teams goes a long way in building trust.
Speaking about trust, AMAs give users a chance to know more about the founders. If they are open to sharing their background and past experiences, it helps with the trust factor. It can raise some red flags if they prefer to be doxxed and share very little information.
Brings Clarity on Pressing Issues
One of the biggest benefits of conducting crypto AMA sessions is that they can be done instantly on any social media platform. This is important because when there’s a crisis and users are panicking — it allows founders and other leadership team members to step up and provide assurance that there’s nothing to worry about. They usually share data to back up their claims.
A recent example here is exchange solvency issues. When exchanges started blowing up, it immediately set fire alarms for investors and traders, causing bank runs. To help bring back confidence, exchanges started communicating with the community in an AMA format.
Changpeng Zhao, CEO of Binance exchange, is an industry leader who has done regular AMAs to address FUD circulating across news outlets.
Increases Brand Awareness
Building a brand and expanding the online presence of that brand is a continuous process. As a marketer, finding creative ways to introduce your brand to new audiences is important. AMAs can help in this regard as they can help build brand recognition over a period of time.
Further, a crypto AMA session is a great way to tell your business story and drive the brand narrative.
If you want to use AMAs to increase brand awareness, you should establish an empathy framework towards the community and not make it all about the company.
Plus, you should make it easier to discover your AMA. By following these simple steps, you can create a well-known brand identity that will pay dividends in the long term.
Types of Crypto AMA Sessions
Not all AMA sessions are the same. While some are casual and conversational, others follow a professional setup. You should choose whichever suits you the best and be consistent at it for the betterment of your crypto community. If you’re figuring it out, you can check out the types of crypto AMA sessions given below.
Reddit Q/A
Reddit is one of the first social media platforms to roll out AMA features. It quickly became popular because it provided an online forum where people asking questions stayed anonymous. The AMA subreddit is among the most followed on the platform, with over 22 million members.
Considering crypto folk love privacy, Reddit can be used for conducting AMA sessions.
This could include answering queries regarding how to use the product and customer support issues. So Reddit is a good platform to highlight unanswered questions and give more details when there’s a misunderstanding within the community.
Twitter Spaces
Twitter Spaces is one of the most used mediums to launch AMAs. As crypto communities hang out on Twitter, it makes it an easy choice to host AMA sessions. Another advantage of Twitter Spaces is that it gives more exposure to a wide range of crypto market participants. From newcomers to subject matter experts, everyone can join and share their opinion.
If you’re starting with AMAs, you should not miss this medium. Twitter Spaces are easy to organize and market to the masses, and their flexible nature also makes it simpler to add speakers. Most importantly, Twitter Spaces are interactive and allow community members to ask follow-up questions. If the platform adds face-to-face communication soon, it will make AMAs even more engaging.
Instagram Stories
While Instagram is a lesser-used social media platform in crypto, it still features tons of content attracting crypto enthusiasts. Ask Me Anything sessions on Instagram can be simple written messages or videos posted as stories.
If you want to do a more engaging AMA session, you can even go live on Instagram. You can take the questions from the comment section, add people to your live stream, and provide the necessary answers.
Webinars
Webinars are usually used for pre-recorded AMA sessions. Webinars offer more control and structure to companies. As a result, they tend to avoid the tough questions from users and hand-pick ones they will be comfortable answering on a public forum.
AMA webinars are also time-consuming. It requires many marketing efforts to send invites to community members and ensure they make it on time. In addition, most webinar applications have a limit on how many people can join. So it’s not an effective medium to address the entire community in one place.
Telegram
Telegram is among the most used social media platforms to build crypto communities and publish regular news and project updates. It is also a decent platform for hosting AMA sessions. But suffers from high bots.
So telegram is suitable if you want to do a simple text-based Q&A interview. The community posts the questions in the chat for moderators to select, such that a wide range of topics is covered.
Discord Community Calls
Discord is another social media platform you can use to conduct crypto AMA sessions. Discord is unique because you can make the community exclusive by limiting access to only certain members. This improves engagement quality, making it more sustainable in the long run.
When it comes to organizing AMAs, Discord helps you start instant community calls. In crypto, most projects conduct these calls weekly to give regular product updates and answer whatever questions are posed by the community.
Tips To Conduct a Successful Crypto AMA Session
If you follow the traditional format of AMAs, you will likely not resonate with the crypto audience and derive any value. To help you avoid that, we present you with tips you can implement and achieve success.
Define AMA goals
Without a goal, your AMAs can be all over the place. So you have to decide what the agenda for an AMA is and prepare accordingly. If it’s going to be promotional, you should be ready with all answers regarding the products.
If your goal for an AMA is simply to create more content, you can be more relaxed as an organizer and let the audience take over the conversations. Either way, you should know how AMAs will benefit your organization.
Choose the right speaker lineup
One of the mistakes most marketers make is they select the wrong speakers. When someone is not competent enough about a topic, they can disrupt AMA flow when users ask follow-up questions. This can send a wrong message to the community and create a bad impression.
So, it’s important to have speakers who are experts on the topic at hand. For example, if the cryptocurrency AMA is project development, it only makes sense to have engineers and other project operators as the main speakers.
Distribute AMA content across social media
When an AMA session is over, it doesn’t mean its purpose ends. You can repurpose the same content multiple times for posting on different social media platforms. The best way to do this is by taking sound bites and quotes from speakers.
Distributing AMA content can help with brand awareness. So it’s important to stay consistent on all platforms. It can also be posted on video platforms like YouTube to act as a digital asset for generating leads.
Have a Q&A prepared in advance
There’s nothing wrong with preparing a list of questions and answers before your AMA session. You can do this by searching the questions most asked to customer support. You can also find some burning questions on social media platforms like Twitter and Reddit.
Once you have a basic idea of what questions a user can ask during an AMA, you can control the flow of the event and be confident in the delivery of answers. This will also help speakers face tough questions.
Reach out to your attendees once AMA is over
If you want your AMAs to have more impact, you should reach out to people who joined and actively participated. This shows you care about your community and respect them for taking time out to participate in an activity. You can also ask for feedback on the session.
If you recorded the AMA, you could send the recording to everyone who missed it via mail. In the beginning, you may not see any results. But, slowly, the conversation rates will improve, and network effects will come into play by the next AMA session.
Closing Thoughts
Marketing in crypto involves many factors. But the most important is community. And one of the best ways to interact with the community is through an AMA. It is simple yet effective to raise brand awareness and address users during emergencies.
To make AMAs a key part of your marketing plans, you should carefully assess which platform your target audience uses the most.
Once you choose the platform, you can start promoting your AMA sessions. You can also make a schedule every week for AMAs to maintain consistency.
In conclusion, projects willing to be transparent and honest in AMAs will stand apart from the crowd and make a bigger impact in the community.