NEAR Reddit 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.
When we began our operation in April, we had 555 subscribers. Since then, our subscriber number has more than doubled, reaching a total of 1,168 by July 5th.
This is the only other metric we found that made much sense. Relative to the rest of the reddit community, our subscriber rank has gone down, indicating a growth trend. This month, we finally trended past the 50k threshold. (I can’t imbed this image on the gov forum, so check out this link if you want to see more r/nearprotocol Subreddit Stats (NEAR))
A note on metrics: we have found that finding good data on subreddit progress is difficult, so we will begin to keep track manually. We will quantify upvotes from each of our accounts, comments on each of our posts, and questions asked on each AMA. These data will help us show progress at the end of each month.
The plan
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. So far, we have hosted Alex Shevshenko from Aurora, Riqi from Paras, Carolin from Mintbase, and Bowen from Proximity Labs.
Going forward, we are going to do more marketing for our AMAs. We will work the NEAR team to publicize the events through twitter, engage the degens in asking questions, and encourage the AMA hosts to use their own platforms to drive traffic.
Posting on the sub
We try to be as eclectic as possible when it comes to sharing content on the r/nearprotocol subreddit. Our content manager chooses posts by scouring NEAR twitter, gathering content from NEAR guilds, official NEAR twitter pages, degens, and twitter shill accounts. One of the popular mechanisms we are working on is dispersing “meme drop mondays” from Swine Guild. Posts come in the form of pictures, links to twitter posts, questions about price predictions, and general shitposting. We normally seed the posts with a number of comments from our own accounts, and upvote any organic engagement that comes about.
We feel like this is the portion of the NEAR sub that needs the least improvement. We are providing 3 posts a day, every single day, and we are getting a lot of traction. However, we can always do more, and towards this end, we are working with the guilds to develop contests to be hosted on the subreddit. Mineral Guild might host a price prediction contest on the sub, or Swine Guild can offer a meme contest. These contests will be hosted later this month.
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 are totally revamping this strategy. We are bringing 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 will be creating 2 very high effort posts per week on topics related to these priorities. These posts will be shared with Joep to discuss sharing on twitter, purchasing upvotes to gain rapid exposure, and mobilizing degens to quickly engage with the content. We have set the number of weekly posts low both to ensure that proper mobilization can be achieved each time, and to reduce the cost of purchasing upvotes each week.
The team
Sue - organizes AMAs, writes reports, quality control, communication and interfacing
Alfonse - sharing r/nearprotocol post schedule on other subs
Seth - Strategic posting in other subs, works with Joep to coordinate the posting
Georgia - Takes care of all posting on the r/nearprotocol subreddit, manages accounts
Jack - Creates the posting schedule each day for r/nearprotocol, assisting with posting and commenting
Proposed Budget
With our current budget of 1200 NEAR a month, we are paying certain early members more than the recent hires. The original payment structure was based off of a team of 4, at 300 NEAR per month each. Ideally, we would like to be able to pay each of our members 400 NEAR a month, coming out to a total of 2000 for monthly expenses.
