Last December, Facebook officially began allowing crypto advertisers to buy ads on its platform. This quiet but important change meant that a long-closed marketing avenue for crypto products was now open. But what are best practices for crypto marketers in general? And is the platform worth exploring for crypto and NFT projects?
First, let’s understand just what is allowed on Facebook and other platforms. Facebook allows some crypto companies to advertise without submitting proof of financial licenses. These include crypto tax services, events, blockchain news and wallets. What’s interesting, however, is you probably haven’t seen many of these ads popping up on social media at all, a testament to the long-running contention between crypto marketers and platforms like Twitter or Facebook.
Further, if you want to advertise mining hardware, cryptocurrency exchanges or trading platforms, or even a wallet that allows you to buy, sell, or swap crypto, you will need a BitLicense (if you’re in New York) or a FinCEN Money Services Business license (in the rest of the U.S.). For international projects, you can find your requirements on Facebook’s policy site.
But just because you can advertise on Facebook doesn’t mean you should.
‘The real opportunity is SEO/organic’
Many marketers have given up on Facebook entirely.
“What’s Facebook?” asked Itai Elizur of MarketAcross. “I think the crypto ‘watercooler’ is Twitter, but the real opportunity is SEO/organic, as we see search volumes increasing while Google keeps penalizing many crypto news sites. This means there is a place for brands to capture that high-quality user intent traffic.”
Elizur doesn’t believe paid ads on Facebook or Twitter work for crypto projects, which makes things much harder for traditional marketers to take on these kinds of gigs.
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Crypto marketing is a very new field. A few years ago, PR professionals would avoid crypto entirely, but now they’re running to well-heeled clients who may or may not have a real business model. And they’re finding out that it is wildly hard to get the attention they once got for other tech products like gadgets and software.
“Paid social does have a place for driving awareness for blockchain and crypto projects, but there are a lot of challenges in the space right now,” said Rachel Stoll, founder of Persephone Digital. “Specifically, NFT social is filled with pay-to-play opportunities for promotion, giveaways, or pinned posts across various subreddits and Discords without any real transparency. Most of our clients who do these types of paid placements as one-offs don’t see success, and I suspect that is because the people selling these spots are relying on their bot-driven following.”
This means that marketers have to rethink the way they use paid social media. In fact, most avoid it altogether.
“Clients should consider paid social (which, yes, includes influencers and talent) as part of their overall marketing plan just like any other brand, but they do need to be extra aware of avoiding the hype accounts and crushing spam that unfortunately feels like the norm,” said Stoll. “Social, as a whole, has been and always will be about building real community, and so getting value from social and paid social requires true alignment with your project and ethos.”
Social media marketing for crypto has limitations
Here’s the bottom line: Social media platforms and their human/AI moderators don’t have enough context on most crypto projects to allow for unfettered advertising. This is because the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has some very stringent and difficult-to-manage regulations when it comes to financial advertisements.
For example, according to a recent SEC memo, ads that make “a material statement of fact that the [advertiser] does not have a reasonable basis for believing it will be able to substantiate upon demand” is a no-no, which is a problem for crypto products.
Most crypto products are decidedly forward-looking — their full value won’t be known for some time, but the product road map, so familiar to tech companies, promises, if not returns, at least usability as a fintech product. Further, social media ads have to be catchy, and viral ads need simple, bold imagery. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for the SEC’s warning that ads can’t discuss “any potential benefits without providing fair and balanced treatment of any associated material risks or limitations.”
Social media services can’t police all of these things and therefore often just create blanket bans, something that many marketers find themselves butting up against even on services that are ostensibly crypto-friendly.
Marketing best practices are emerging
Elizur believes that Discord and Telegram are the best for community-building, while Twitter is good for giveaways and airdrops. Because Twitter doesn’t often shut down personal or corporate accounts for talking about financial info, the only thing a marketer has to consider is being slapped by a regulator for talking about an unlicensed security. In theory, this is wildly dangerous and could get you into real trouble.
Luckily, most marketers are taking this into consideration.
“Focus on ‘are,’ ‘is,’ and ‘doing,’ and not ‘want to,’ ‘will,’ or ‘can.’ Crypto has seen too many false promises and hype cycles,” said Elizur. “Don’t focus your marketing on vision and dreams.”
Kris Ruby, CEO of Ruby Media Group, said that the best way to work with social media is to avoid the paid route and just use the tools as a broadcast and communications medium.
“The opportunity for Facebook marketing is in private groups,” she said. “The high-level CEO- and entrepreneur-only business groups I am in are where most discussions about crypto happen from a strategic point of view. It is not about shilling projects — it is about understanding how these projects play a role in a brand’s larger corporate identity in web3.”
Ruby recommends joining these groups and communicating with the members in a way that doesn’t focus on shilling. She also warns that social media efforts can backfire.
“If you are marketing your crypto project on Twitter, you may want to review tweets from 10 years ago for every employee attached to the project,” she said. “Crypto cancel culture is real — in the last week alone, there have been three high-profile cancellations because of past tweets. Companies need to do due diligence on employees’ tweets as much as they do on creating a crypto PR launch strategy.”
Create a social media punch list
Elizur offered a quick and dirty list of techniques to maximize your crypto marketing.
- Open your social media channels and create FOMO. “Having a presence on Discord/Twitter/Telegram is more important than a website. Start small; people love to feel like they found a special gem before ‘the masses’ have,” he said. Use targeted PPC on Twitter and Facebook to drive people to these channels and not directly to your website where you can’t activate them. A Discord room click is far more valuable than a website click.
- Follow the leaders. Elizur often takes cues from successful projects when he advises his clients. If something works, use those techniques. For example, countdowns are often a great way to encourage folks to sign up.
- Engage your base layer. Find the celebrities and gatekeepers on each platform, be it Ethereum, Solana, Polygon or the like. “Getting their attention is at times much faster than going bottom up,” he said.
- Stay in stealth, but not too long. There is no benefit to doing a PR push when your token or project is small. “Maintaining attention in the crypto space is very hard. That’s why it’s important to try and save your aces for when they mean the most,” he said.
- Don’t focus on the drop. “Listing day” is actually when the real work begins. The worst thing that can happen to a token or project is a strong start and then going quiet a few weeks after launch. Crypto fans are very cognizant of rug-pulls and the like, so you should always keep an ace for when things get slow.
The advice is simple: Use the tools that work best for your purpose. Whether it’s running a Telegram and Youtube AMA or buying PPC space for a particular fan group, there are myriad ways to market your project that doesn’t require a clickable banner on Facebook or Google.
While things may change now that Facebook has opened the floodgates for crypto projects, sometimes the old ways of building virality and popularity are best.
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