a16z Social Media Operation Experience What Did We Do Right to Increase Fans by 100,000 in 1 Year from 0?

a16z Social Media Success 100k Fans in 1 Year from 0 - How Did We Do It?

Author: Ish Verduzco, Director of Social Media at a16z; Translation: TechFlow

Recently, a16z’s total social media followers surpassed 100,000, achieving this milestone in just one year. In this article, their Director of Social Media, Ish Verduzco, will share their insights and future plans.

Here are a few points that are currently working well:

1) Highly shareable content

• ETHS hits a new high, how sophisticated are the operational methods behind it?
• Current Status and Potential Variables of MakerDAO, the ‘DeFi Veteran
• Can Social Tokens Recreate the Glory of DeFi Summer?

Thanks to our outstanding editorial team, I have continuous access to a large amount of high-quality content, including research reports and interviews. I try to create social-first content from these blogs and podcasts. Usually, I guide readers to view the full content at the end of the post.

2) Community management

In addition to creating highly shareable content, I believe community management is a key factor in our rapid growth, especially in the first 6 months of launching our social media accounts. During the launch or announcement period, I spend several hours a day responding to mentions and interacting with users as much as possible. This creates an engagement flywheel effect, allowing more users to see our brand and visit our profile, with a certain percentage choosing to follow us.

3) Community Q&A

I have reduced my focus on this aspect in recent months, as it seems that everyone is asking questions just to attract interaction. However, my original intention was to ask thought-provoking questions for specific target audiences, hoping that each reply would bring value to the readers of the article.

4) External promotion

This is one way we initially gathered social media audiences. Utilizing existing channels such as email and podcasts has helped us a lot, especially in the early stages. This gave us the necessary momentum so that when we share good content, there are existing listeners who will forward and spread it.

5) Leveraging existing networks

I have made every effort to follow our employees on social media (helping them create and edit social content), which in turn allows our brand account to reach more users. This requires more workload, collaborating and editing with dozens of people one-on-one, but it is very worthwhile to see increased engagement on profiles and our brand account.

In the future, I plan to double the production of social-first content.

Long-form tweets, uploading full videos directly to social media platforms instead of YouTube links, summaries, insights, etc. In short, make our social content more addictive and know that a certain percentage of users will eventually go outside the platform to view the complete source (blogs, podcasts, etc.). It is evident that sharing links is detrimental to our organic reach, so limiting the number of links shared per post should be helpful.

Finally, we are currently present on 4 social platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn, Farcaster, and Instagram. The largest user base is on Twitter (72,000), followed by LinkedIn (26,000), then Farcaster (2,000), and our recently joined Instagram. In addition to YouTube, we use it more as a repository for long videos and also experiment with short videos. I believe we will continue this state for a while, as adding another social platform would spread our resources too thin.

Here’s an interesting fact: although our number of Twitter users is more than twice that of LinkedIn, our performance on LinkedIn is actually better (with higher average engagement per user).

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