How to Build an NFT Community

As the online economy continues to progress, as does the technology and how brands and businesses utilize it to further build their communities. From blogs to social media, online community-building tools and tactics are evolving. Now with NFTs, many personal brands and businesses are racing to figure out the best way to use NFTs to build their community.

To build an NFT community you need to define your audience, share your journey, choose your platform(s), create value, drive demand, and keep creating. It takes patience and consistency to build your own NFT community, it doesn’t happen overnight.

I have been a part of many NFT communities, and although I have seen some success, I have also experienced many failures. In this article, I am going to teach you everything you need to know about building your own NFT community.

How to build an NFT community?

An NFT community is similar to building a brand. Building a community requires a lot of hard work, consistency, and requires a ton of patience. Think of brands like Pokemon. It wasn’t built overnight, rather, it has been built for nearly 30 years.

Those who have fostered successful NFT communities have successfully built a brand name for themselves, their company, or a mixture of the two.

To build an NFT community, there are some general steps that you will need to take. I have outlined them below.

1. Define your audience

Before you can begin building your own NFT community, you need to decide who your target audience is. Are you creating a sport-related NFT, music NFT, what is it that you are creating, and who are the people that you want to be a part of your community? Once you know that, you can begin creating content on various platforms that target people with similar interests.

2. Share your journey

Once you know the type of people you want to attract to your NFT project/brand, you can begin sharing your journey with those people. This also ties in with being transparent with your community, even before you foster a group of people. Sharing all the ups and downs of your journey is what people love to see because it’s real, and we all experience ups and downs in life.

From sharing clips of your creative process to talking about what you see happening in your niche, share it all with the world. Those who are interested will come, those who aren’t won’t. It’s the most simple process of elimination you can execute. 

3. Choose your platform(s)

Okay, so you want to share your journey, but you don’t know where to share it. The first question I would ask is; “Where does your prospective community hang out?” Are they on a certain platform like Twitter and TikTok? 

You can find out where your potential community is by consuming some content for yourself. If you notice that others with similar interests are on TikTok, then start creating TikTok videos. 

Remember, there’s only one way to know if something works for sure, and that’s by trying it out and staying consistent. You can always change the platform or type of content you create, but first, you have to do some testing.

Some of the most popular platforms for creating an NFT community currently include Twitter, Discord, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

4. Create value

Alright, now you have some eyes on your NFT brand, maybe you have even fostered a community of five people. Think, how can you provide value to your five followers? Is it through a product, a service, entertainment, or perhaps a combination of many things? You have to decide. Again, trial and error is your best friend. 

When you are this early on in the building process of your NFT community, you can afford to make mistakes because you have fewer people that will know about it. Use this to your advantage and try out everything! You will likely find that some things work, and others fail horribly. And that is okay. Take that feedback and use it to make a better product next time.

5. Drive demand

Let’s say you have formed a small NFT community, you provided some value to your community, and the feedback was good. Now it’s time to drive some demand. How do you do this? 

Show everyone what you have to offer. I don’t mean spam everyone, rather, share what you have offered to others and why they appreciated what you created.

If you have done a good job of building your small community, your consumers will naturally want to share your success along with the value they received from you with their friends and family, or perhaps another community that they are a part of.

The more organic and less forced the demand is, the better. Generally, providing value and helping others is a genuine way to drive demand for anything you have to offer. As a result, more people will want to join your community.

6. Keep creating

It doesn’t stop once you’ve hit a certain number of community members. If your goal is to continue growing your NFT community, then you need to continually provide value, remain completely transparent, and be consistent and innovative with your efforts. 

Your main goal should be to always provide as much value to your community, without expecting anything in return. Only then will you have successfully built a community that is loyal to you, your NFT brand/business, and the products and services you offer.

Consider this, if you fail to provide value to a community of five people, then how do you expect to provide value to one thousand people, or even one million? You won’t. Focus on what you can do now, not what you want to do once you have a large community.

What is an NFT community?

An NFT community is a group of individuals who come together to support a specific NFT project or group of projects. NFT communities generally come together to talk about advancements in the project, speculate on future prices and goals, as well as help each other out.

NFT communities are formed across various niches and in varying quantities. A community might be as small as 100 people, or as large as 1 million people. Ultimately, the size of your community is a result of the amount of effort and value you are providing to your community and not the other way around.

If you want to build a strong NFT community, stop worrying about the numbers, and start worrying about what you can do for others.

Why are NFT communities important?

The importance of fostering a solid NFT community around your NFT project stems from the fact that without a community, aka, a group of people who want to support what you are doing and the products or services you offer, you don’t have a sustainable business.

NFT communities are important because they bring together groups of people with common goals and interests to help build and grow your brand. Without a community, you don’t have a brand or a business, you simply have an idea.

With that being said, here is how building an NFT community can help grow your personal brand or large-scale business:

• Spread awareness: A direct result of building a community around your NFT project is increased awareness of your brand. As people begin to talk about your NFT project, others will take note and the word will begin to spread. This word-of-mouth is essentially free marketing.
  
• Build trust: Fostering a community and building trust go hand-in-hand. The more your community trusts you, the more willing they are to invest in your vision. Also, the more trust you gain, the more likely people in your community are going to spread awareness about what it is you are doing. Surely, you’re beginning to see how this is all coming together.
  
• Help others: Regardless of where you are at in your NFT community-building journey, you can always help others. However, the stronger your community is, the more opportunities you might have to help others. You can leverage your brand to help others in your community, or even help another NFT community. The more people that trust you, the more open others will be to receiving help from you.
  
• Receive feedback: One of the greatest benefits of building a community is receiving feedback. You shouldn’t expect to do everything right the first time around, hence why feedback is so important. There will always be something that you could have done better, and your community is sure to let you know. Take this feedback and turn it into something great. Remember, the market is always right.

What makes a good NFT community?

The question that many of us would give an arm and a leg to know the answer to is; what makes a good NFT community? There are many factors to take into account when building a “good” NFT community, but here are the most important ones:

Value

To build a good NFT community, first, you have to provide others with value. Now, value can appear in many forms and is subjectively based on the type of community you are building. For example, if you are trying to build a brand like Pokemon, then you should think of ways that you can create value for those who believe in your vision.

In the NFT space, the more valuable your brand is considered to be, the more value you are able to extract back into your community.

Let’s say you are building a brand that involves various characters. Some examples of providing value might come in the form of creating entertaining or helpful content using those characters. 

Then, as the characters become more popular, you can create merchandise using those characters and ensure that your community has first dibs on that merchandise, or even provide holders of your NFTs with free merchandise.

Another example of value can come in the form of helping others without expecting anything in return. In a space like NFTs and Web3 which is still very new, a little help can go a long way. 

Ultimately, if you lend a hand without expecting a hand, others will be very appreciative of your true and honest efforts.

Communication

I have been a part of many NFT communities, both good and bad, and one of the most important signs of a good community is communication. You could also look at communication as a form of customer service, either way, communication is absolutely necessary.

Whether you are communicating some exciting updates, or even a mistake that you’ve made, communicating is always better than not communicating. A communicative NFT project shows that you are willing to take accountability for all your actions, as well as provide others with all the information they need to know in order to make the best decisions on their end. 

Communicate, communicate, communicate. I can’t emphasize enough how important communication is when building a good NFT community. If you don’t communicate often enough, trust me, your community will be the first to let you know.

Transparency

Transparency is often talked about in the NFT and Web3 space, and for a good reason. People like to be informed, they like to know what is going on, and not just sometimes, but as often as possible.

NFTs are built on a transparent platform—the blockchain—but that doesn’t mean that as a person or business, you shouldn’t be as transparent as possible with your community, as well. 

Transparency means that you take accountability for your actions as an operator of your NFT project, you communicate what you are doing and how you’re doing it, as well as if you make mistakes you own up to them.

At the end of the day, your community will be much more receptive to your honesty and transparency over your lies or attempt to cover up a mistake. We are all human, and we all make mistakes, just be open about it, and your community will thank you.