Red Flags in NFT Promotion
26 October 2022For NFT collections to sell quickly, they need competent promotion. This is relatively easy to do if you know how various websites work, the market’s guiding principles, and advertising basics. Still, not everyone who promotes NFTs finds success. There are a million examples of how a seemingly good collection collapsed due to inadequate marketing. This sometimes happens due to incompetence or fraud.
How to tell if you are dealing with scammers
Before we examine the signs of slow progress, it is worth dwelling on a few terms that may not be as clear-cut as they appear:
- Scam, or swindle, is a confidence game or another fraudulent scheme, especially for making a quick profit;
- Fraud is credit card graft that is common in e-commerce. In English-speaking countries, the word denotes all types of crimes, while in other regions it specifically means IT-related crimes;
- Paid engagement is fictitious actions aimed at obtaining illegal gains and fraudulent profit.
It is essential to remember that there are many people unafraid of committing online fraud to cash in on other users’ gullibility. The common signals that may alert you to the fact that you are dealing with scammers are:
- incomprehensible private messages;
- unreasonable community growth;
- vague future projection;
- reluctance to reveal the project team’s past;
- wildly different prices compared to popular NFTs;
- e-mail spelling errors;
- delays in contractual obligations, psychological manipulation;
- fake influencers, impostors.
Many believe that a large community is always good and helps achieve great results, but it is actually subscriber activity that is of great importance. Some scammers artificially increase the number of followers they have on different social media by software means. This, of course, does nothing to form an active community that will share the collection with friends and anticipate the beginning of sales. In addition, the platform may notice the interference and block the rule-breaking page.
When promoting their collection, a real team will post regular updates and projections as to what progress can be achieved by a certain point in time. If such forecasts are absent, you are very likely dealing with scammers.
When promoting an NFT collection, it is imperative to understand the project’s core idea and what the developers have in store for its participants. It allows to successfully identify potential audience, choose the best websites for placing ads, or even find a celebrity for an integration. Definitely stay on your guard if you see that a project does not actively pursue these goals.
How to understand that an NFT project is failing
There are several tell-tale signs that an NFT project’s promotion has failed, with the most notable being:
- sudden change of plans;
- regular floor price reduction;
- declining activity in social media;
- delays, unfulfilled expectations, and developer silence;
- discrepancy between rhetoric and the actual situation on the market.
To effectively promote any collection, one needs to attract a vibrant community on at least two social media platforms — Twitter and Discord. Audience growth is usually the fastest during initial promotion stages as social networks tend to promote new users. One can ensure that this growth will continue in the future with regular posts regarding essential and exciting information, contests, polls, etc. Poor social media management, on the other hand, always spells bad news.
In general, you can get an idea of how successful a promotion is by glancing at follower growth rates on the project’s official social media pages. If the project does not cheat by artificially inflating these numbers, they become a litmus test of how much people are interested in the given product.
However, if you notice that the public’s interest in your project is beginning to wane, it does not mean that good fortune has turned away from you forever. What it means is that it is time to revise your promotion strategy or hire better specialists to help you out.