Building a Successful Web3 Community: Healthy Growth

A successful community relies on the efforts of the community manager at every stage:

During the challenging initial phase, the community manager overcomes the difficulty of acquiring customers, ensuring a stable customer base for the community.

In the growth phase, the community manager addresses member activation issues, converting community members into product users and improving conversion rates.

With stable customer acquisition and high conversion rates, the community enters a mature stage. However, three new challenges await the community manager: RRR.

The 3R Challenges

The concept of 3R originates from the AARRR model. In the initial and growth stages, community managers accomplish the first two tasks: Acquisition and Activation. The subsequent challenge is the 3R hurdles.

Retention:Encouraging users to continue using the product or service and maintaining their loyalty.
Revenue:Generating income through user behavior.
Referral: Encouraging existing users to recommend the product or service to others, thereby achieving secondary propagation.

As the community matures, some users may lose interest in the community or product, leading to a decrease in engagement. Additionally, as the community scales and complexity increases, conflicts may arise between new and existing members. These factors can all contribute to a decline in community user retention rates.

This article will focus on the first key issue among these three challenges: community retention rates, aiming to provide insights for community managers.

The Quantity and Duration of Consensus

The quantity of consensus affects how many high-retention users a community can have, while the duration of consensus impacts how long users stay in the community. The formation of consensus relies on user expectations, which can be related to product features or pricing.

For projects that have already issued tokens, user expectations, and outcomes typically manifest in asset prices. When users anticipate that project development will increase the value of their assets, they are more likely to confidently hold or trade these assets, thereby increasing the circulation and holding volume of the project, creating a positive cycle.

For projects that have not yet issued tokens, user expectations are usually sustained through Token Generation Events (TGEs). Users anticipate future airdrops or token distributions, thus choosing to stay in the community to await future rewards.

How to Trigger User Expectations?

Any dynamic can serve as an influencing factor. Collaboration information, product updates, and the status of proposals, among others, all contribute. When user expectations are continuously met, consensus gradually forms, thereby strengthening user retention and engagement.

Many community managers regularly post tweets within the community, encouraging community users to retweet and like for this reason. It's important to maximize the weight of information and increase its dissemination to subtly instill new expectations in users.

This is a mechanical operational behavior, and many community managers use bots to reduce repetitive work: bots can automatically forward project information to the community. However, bots have a downside: they cannot stimulate user-sharing behavior. Why not turn this information into personalized tasks? This approach can not only expand the reach of information but also promote community interaction.

TaskOn's Smart Task feature can automatically fetch updates from the project's official account and turn them into various tasks, expanding the dissemination of information and fostering expectations among more users.

Continuous Interaction: Frequency Forms Habits

Habits are formed based on frequency rather than duration. There's a very common phrase: "It takes 21 days to form a habit." However, it's actually the repeated behavior every day for 21 days that form the habit.

To improve user retention rates, the question facing community managers becomes: How many interactions do users need to develop a habit? Successful projects in the past have focused on encouraging users to use their products every day:

• Centralized exchanges host continuous trading competitions.

• L1/L2 projects consistently support projects within their ecosystems, integrate more dApps, and encourage users to explore their ecosystems.

• dApps constantly expand the reach of their projects.

  
  

TaskOn, a community solution platform, recognizes the importance of frequency. In the community task template, there's an important task-setting option: Recurrence. When setting community tasks, community managers can specify the frequency at which community members should complete the tasks.

Currently, there are options for Once/Daily/Weekly/Monthly. Once set, the tasks automatically refresh, saving community managers from repetitive operations.

To improve retention rates, community managers need to string together enough user actions until these behaviors are firmly embedded in users' minds.

Perfecting the Incentive System

There's a potential disconnect between timely rewards and delayed rewards that needs attention. For projects that haven't issued tokens yet, a Token Generation Event (TGE) can be seen as a form of delayed reward. During the wait for rewards, some users may feel that their actions lack meaning due to the lack of timely feedback, leading them to give up on continued participation.

One way to address this issue is to provide some immediate, visible incentives or feedback to encourage ongoing participation. For example, project teams can incentivize continued participation before the TGE by setting milestone rewards or periodic incentives. These rewards can take the form of virtual rewards, badges of honor, or elevation in community status to make users feel that their contributions are recognized and give them motivation to continue participating.

Currently, there's a trend in the market: the introduction of a points system as an immediate incentive, where users' contributions are measured in points.

I once wrote an article on points systems, detailing the benefits and how to quickly set up such a system. You can refer to it for more information. (How Points System Affects Web3 Community Development & Engagement)

Healthy Growth

Some rely on advertising for growth, others on third-party growth platforms, and some on Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) for growth. While pouring a lot of money into advertising and marketing can quickly expand a community in the short term, once the investment stops, the number of community users can decrease rapidly. For mature communities, increasing user retention is crucial for healthy growth. Integrating the product into users' daily lives and making product usage a habit is key.