Now before I begin discussing what I think things are that we should be focusing and funding in terms of marketing Hive, I want to point out that I'm not being dismissive or trying to put down some attempts that have been made here in the past, mostly referring to 
Some things that I think we may be focusing on which might be too early or coming off from the wrong angle I think currently is trying to market and onboard to people who are new to crypto as a whole. I don't mean new as in they've never heard of it, I think crypto has been a thing long enough now for most people to have heard about Bitcoin, but I mean new as in experiencing it for the first time and getting to use it. I'm not going to point at direct examples here of what went wrong and which ones I think were the worst attempts, it's pointless to look back. A better thing is to look back at what worked and consider branching onto that further, which also brings me to what I believe we should be focusing on more rather than the other option.
Although as many of you know, being the creator of POSH and excited about what that is doing for our presence on crypto twitter I'm not going to discuss that in this post as I think that deserves its own post that I'd want to dig a bit deeper into, talk future and how we can help it evolve even more. This will be about other marketing initiatives we should be focusing on.
One of the main things that I've been involved in myself and noticed how well it worked is targeting communities that already are familiar and involved with crypto in their day to day. At the end of 2021 we created a big contest for the Gods Unchained community, a trading card game that has no direct ties to Hive in any way, shape or form, but at the same time doesn't have anything compared to Hive they can use for their community. This contest was simple, there was a prize pool, some that
I have to admit here that the workload was a lot for me personally as I was taking care of onboarding these GU players that wanted to participate, luckily we had set up our unique onboarding links at the time which removed the need for people to verify with SMS or email as they contacted me directly for an invite link through discord or Reddit. There were hundreds of players asking for links in a span of a few days and we quickly saw our community fill up with users. Here's some stats provided by 
Understandably with both GU and Hive slowly dropping down in activity and valuation, although with activity I'd say Hive not as much compared, it meant that the community started to go idle as well. What remains to be seen, though, is that that did not occur too quickly and before that happened a lot of new long term Hive users were formed who took the time to learn what Hive is, how it works and how they can get involved more, some of them even as developers. Many of them started to get involved through 
So where am I going with this?
Here's some things that stand out compared to the more traditional marketing that have been attempted since mostly by funds from the DHF.
Low cost user acquisition.
People are happy to join new platforms if there's something at stake and to be won, even if our prize pool was only of around k3-4$ it resulted in over 900 new sign ups with many still active and vested today over a year later.
Easy integration.
These players are already experienced with crypto through things such as metamask, ethereum L2's and exchanges all of these things we at Hive also have our own versions of in one way or another. They won't stop short at sign up or wonder what these keys are about as much as new users to crypto.
The Hive comparison
Many of these players are already involved in the original project's socials such as Twitter and Reddit. Coming to Hive it's easy for them to understand the basics compared to someone not really familiar with Reddit at all or who don't use Twitter. They also get a quicker glance at the fundamentals and what differentiates Hive to the others and may stick around to learn more.
Lastly, the "hive" marketing tool.
This is something not many may realize because we're unfortunately never crossed the "bigger userbase" yet, but communities such as Gods Unchained on Hive is one of the perfect marketing tools for the users of each and every project out there. Why should these users spend their time and activity on Reddit, Medium, Twitter, etc when they can do the same here, with the same tools such as community moderation, subscription models to communities they're interested in following. Here they can all aside from knowing their text is immutably stored, their following and algo's/shadowbans won't turn against them by the power of a centralized few, also earn from their activity. If anything to invest back in the project('s) they're here to discuss and connect with others for.
If we have a few good examples of this, the Gods Unchained community for instance being one that would start growing and thriving, so much so that the team themselves would want to participate in an official capacity here with their social accounts. This would then become something that we could monetize for future communities:
"Kickstart your community the right way on Hive" with dedicated curators, moderators and content creators who'd be taken care of properly since we on Hive are all about the people compared to #web2 (and many that call themselves #web3 these days) platforms that are mainly there to provide for shareholders and founders. It's something I'd see new projects wanting to pay for to see their communities being taken care of or they themselves buying/leasing Hive Power to curate more directly what they want to see more of in their communities as they grow in the web3 space.
While some here may question what's in it for Hive to reward social users of projects that aren't even on Hive, I personally think that the inflation they may be earning compared to the traction Hive would get for having a growing userbase as a social media platform and potentially see it grow exponentially is nothing compared to what we may "lose" out on by rewarding them with.
I think that going through these methods, offering somewhat big "crypto" communities that don't have something like Hive an easy way to get their community started, incentivizing their followers to use Hive through giveaways and contests funded by the DHF or other stakeholders would go a long way compared to the "general users" we may be spending funds on now.
While there's nothing wrong in getting regular users who are new to crypto to Hive, their learning curve is a lot steeper and their retention may be a lot harder than those I mentioned above. It might not only be cheaper but also better for long term to get those in who are easier to stick until we get that "social effect" where everyone knows someone who's on Hive and thriving to want to get an account and become active without directly being invited to it through these incentives.
Lastly, I'm also not a big proponent of "ads" in the term where we have Hive logo's, magazines and fliers going out to try and get regular people to use Hive. I think it's a somewhat outdated method to get people interested in something and most may be quite hesitant to try it out if that's the way they first get introduced to it. I know I personally ignore ads completely, aside from how they may affect me subconsciously, I'm way more eager to research companies/platforms through reviews than take their word for it and buy a product/service based on them having advertised themselves to me. Same here goes for influencers who've become walking advertisement billboards in this day and age and why I don't believe that paying random influencers to discuss hive in a few videos or tweets has a lot of effect on the users we want to see joining and staying here.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this and if you think we should attempt to fund this a bit more to try it out and possibly compare it to the other attempts. I haven't discussed this with projects such as
I don't think anyone can dispute that compared to the costs of what we've tried aside from this in the past, this one has outperformed them by a landslide, but if you think otherwise or have counter arguments why this method is weaker, I'd like to hear and discuss those too of course. Thanks for reading.
