NEAR Reddit Ops Team Report
July 2021
Background
The Reddit Ops Team has been working to increase engagement with NEAR protocol since April of 2021. The goal of the reddit operation is to increase engagement with the NEAR community. We accomplish this goal by hosting AMAs on the r/nearprotocol subreddit, sharing general content on the r/nearprotocol sub, and posting on other subs.
On July 5th, we had 1,168 subscribers. Today, July 31st, we have 1,276 members. This is very strong growth towards our goal of 1,500 members by the end of quarter 3.
This month, we began to take tracking our reddit performance personally, if you will. We have begun to track each of our posts, including the upvotes and comments received per post. We believe this is the most transparent way to show the work we are doing to increase engagement with NEAR protocol on reddit. Below is the compilation of all of the posting we have done on the reddit page:
Link
Another way to visualize the content
Reddit AMAs
Every other week, we bring on a member of the NEAR community to answer questions on the sub. This has been our strongest instrument for driving engagement so far; we always see a significant jump in comments, upvotes, and subscribers when we post our AMAs. This past month, we hosted Ozymandius from 4nts Guild and Open Forest Protocol and Matt Lockyer, who needs no introduction.
This month, we were a bit more intentional about marketing our AMAs. We shared infographics well in advance with other guilds, telegram chats, and the hosts of our AMAs to encourage dispersion prior to the event. For the first time, we coordinated with the official NEAR twitter page, who tweeted the link out when the AMA went live. We will continue to engage the entire NEAR ecosystem to optimize engagement with our content.
Posting on the sub
We have a content officer responsible for creating all of the posts that go out on the r/nearprotocol subreddit. We aim to provide 3 posts a day to the sub, in an effort to drive more organic engagement. The only days we fail to post thrice are when there are holidays or we are hosting an AMA, and want to give that content space.
The content in the posts varies greatly. On Monday’s, there is an emphasis on sharing Swine Guild’s #MemeDropMonday. Throughout the rest of the week, posts consist of promoting events such as OWS Sandbox parties & AMAs, NEAR blogs explaining new developments in the ecosystem, infographics introducing new guilds, available NFTs to buy with NEAR, and simply questions about NEAR/DAPPS. This job is important and effective because it generates an increase in organic interaction within the community on Reddit. Since beginning this job, other than the significant spike in the number of members on r/nearprotocol, we have noticed a gradual growth in the amount of organic comments & upvotes on the posts within the subreddit. People seem to be engaging with the content more and more. We feel that as long as we continue to create these daily posts, the NEAR community will only continue to grow via Reddit and become more and more informed about the developments that are evolving in the ever-growing NEAR ecosystem. In order to continue improving the outcomes of this project, we plan to gear more of the content towards proposing questions to other community members, further generating natural engagement with non-NEAR employed users.
Posting on other subs
Our strategy prior to July consisted of taking posts scheduled for the main sub, and sharing them in 2 different subs each day. So, if there was a post about the Mintbase launch, we would post it in r/nearNFT or simply r/NFT. This strategy had limited effect, since many subreddits have high kharma thresholds, and our comments would be taken down or shadow banned.
This month, we revamped this strategy. We are brought on another member, Seth, to do more engaged post planning. We have been given access to the Trello, where we can see the most important NEAR marketing priorities. Our new member creates 2 high effort posts per week on topics related to these priorities. These posts will be shared with Joep to discuss sharing on twitter, mobilizing degens to quickly engage with the content, and sharing with the guilds to foster cross-ecosystem awareness. We have set the number of weekly posts low both to ensure that proper mobilization can be achieved each time.
Note from Seth, our community Ops member specializing in posts in other subs:
I was brought on early in the month of July with the goal of creating more engagement with the NEAR community on different subreddits. I have made two core posts each week, to a variety of subreddits that have some sort of overlap with the operations of NEAR protocol, and sought to incite discussion and raise awareness in various communities. This strategy has seen particularly high levels of engagement, particularly when posts are posed as somewhat philosophical questions. Below follows a list of each post and its statistics regarding engagement. Please note that due to the fact that I joined the team in the second week of July, I have only made 5 core posts, and it will be 6 going forward.
Wildeverse - In my first post I wrote about the Wildeverse festival and the involvement NEAR coin had. This post ended up being removed by moderators of that forum because it was too obviously a promotion of NEAR. This speaks to the necessity of posting questions rather than informative blurbs as it both gets more engagement and will avoid this issue entirely.
Myriad - My next post was regarding Myriad, a web3 social media network that focused on allowing different models of token exchange. This post received a total of 4 upvotes and 16 comments, indicating a high level of discussion.
Sustainability - This post was a pushback against the narrative that cryptocurrency is environmentally damaging, and it pointed out some of the ways that NEAR could potentially be used to help combat climate change rather than contribute to it. This post got 4 upvotes and 2 comments, as it was on a much smaller subreddit with generally less users/engagement.
ICON - This post was regarding the collaboration between ICON, a DeFi platform that is primarily used in Korea and other Eastern states. The post highlighted the positive impacts this had on both NEAR and ICON. This post received 10 upvotes and 4 substantial comments.
Aurora - Aurora is a deFi platform that attempts to circumvent the fees of Ethereum and is built on NEAR protocol. This post was made in the last 24 hours and as such does not have good data on upvotes and comments.
Budget
Last month, we proposed a budget of 2,000 NEAR per month. This breakdown of funds was meant to cover the expenses of each of our members, but we neglected to account for reddit AMAs. We pay out 190 NEAR per AMA, so at 2 AMAs per month that comes to 380 per month. In order to compensate for this quantity, we propose a budget of 2,380 NEAR per month going forward.