How to Hire a Web3 Community Manager
Web3 is rooted in community-centric principles. In fact, it is what it is today because of its community that has for years rallied behind the cause for a decentralized web. One crucial role that emerged from this movement is that of the Web3 Community Manager; a skilled professional responsible for building and maintaining relationships with members of decentralized online communities on a grass-root level.
They are often seen holding discussions, answering questions and organically driving the adoption of Web3 technologies among community members. For this very reason, projects and companies hire Web3 community managers to lead efforts and drive change for their products.
It’s estimated that there are over 10,000 active crypto communities worldwide and research indicates that projects with active and engaged communities are more likely to succeed, with a 12% higher chance of achieving their goals compared to those without a strong community focus.
If you’re still making up your mind or are sure that you want to hire a Web3 Community Manager, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s walk you through everything you need to know about hiring one.
What are the responsibilities of a Web3 Community Manager?
This is a great question to start with and answer. Maybe this is your first community manager hire and you’re not sure of all the responsibilities that are typically assigned for this role.
In a nutshell, here’s what community managers typically do at work:
Community building: Attract, onboard and retain community members for a certain Web3 project or platform. It is important to increase community reach while keeping members interested and engaged through AMAs, hackathons. It goes without saying, technical blockchain knowledge is important to have in order to build and maintain a Web3 community.
Communication and support: Establish open communication with the community. In order to keep members engaged, a community manager must be willing to address concerns, answer questions and provide regular updates on project developments. This also includes helping members with technical issues and ensuring that technical teams are engaged to solve them promptly.
Moderating and crisis management: Due to their proximity to the community, community managers are expected to avert spamming, trolling and inappropriate behavior in their communities. Moreover, if any kind of controversies erupt, they should be the first ones to calm the community down and provide answers on behalf of the company.
Strategize rewards systems: In order to expand the community or get community members to adopt products, community managers need to come up with incentives. These must be planned ahead as they often need to be approved by senior level managers.
Feedback collection: Community managers have to act as a bridge between the community and the project team by gathering feedback, suggestions, and concerns from community members.
Analytics and reporting: Data is important for any kind of decision-making and it applies to community managers as well who must monitor and analyze their community engagement metrics to see what is working in their favor and what isn’t.
Depending on a project, there could be several more expectations from a Web3 community manager. But overall, those mentioned above are typically the go-to in the industry.
Where to find your next Web3 Community Manager
There are several different places to go to if you want to hire a Web3 community manager. The traditional places would be LinkedIn, Indeed, ZipRecruiter and the likes. The drawback here is that Web3 is still a niche category and a lot of prized talent isn’t very active on traditional websites. Instead, they can be found on places like Discord servers, Twitter (now X), and Web3 talent boards. The former two are more suited for passive search, as they aren’t intended for jobs but through networking over the course of several weeks you may find some candidates. Talent boards, on the other hand, are for recruiters actively searching and want to take their pick from a talent pool, like the one available right on the top of this page.
Questions to ask when hiring Web3 community managers
Hiring is a costly, time-consuming process and several Web3 companies want to get it right from the get go. Otherwise it can start to feel like this.
Every recruiter can’t be a master at each and every job position they’re searching for, so it’s important to have a clear understanding of the skills, responsibilities and background of the ideal candidate. This can be achieved through having a set of questions prepared, in this case, for a Web3 community manager interview. Let’s go through some one by one and also state what the right answers would include.
What made you want to join the Web3 and crypto space?
The purpose of this question is to judge the passion of the applicant. Your job as the recruiter is to push further on and see what led to the applicant taking an interest in the space, and if their interest goes deeper than just owning some cryptocurrency recently.
Have you built and managed a community before? Can you tell me more about your experience?
The purpose for asking this question is to know whether or not the candidate has experience in community building and management. A detailed answer would include community names, purpose and function of those communities, change in community engagement while the candidate was there, what actions were taken to maintain and retain members and the like.
It’s important that you don’t just focus on community numbers, as that can be achieved through ads and promotions, and doesn’t necessarily guarantee itself as an organic metric. What you should look for, instead, is whether or not the community was engaging with a product i.e. a coin, a blockchain platform, dApps, etc.
How do you go about keeping yourself updated with the latest developments in blockchain and crypto?
The purpose for asking this question is to determine the ways in which the applicant consumes crypto updates. This could be through anything, ranging from newsletters, events, AMAs, blogs, Twitter posts and updates, forums, podcasts etc. You could also ask for publication names, favorite categories to read in the crypto space, and even ask what time of the day they like to consume such content.
Web3 community managers have the responsibility of knowing what is going on in the space, because that is where their content and communication stem from. If they don’t know what’s going on, they will be unable to deliver and keep the community interested. They won’t be able to have conversations around the latest happenings in their AMAs and voice channels on Discord or Telegram.
Is brand identity important for a crypto project and have you ever implemented it?
The purpose for asking this question is to find out whether the applicant knows what a brand is and what merits it has. There could be two ways this answer could go, one which makes clear the applicant doesn’t have experience, and two which makes clear that the applicant understands what significance brand identity holds for a project and that they have experience in implementing it.
In most scenarios, Web3 companies have their branding teams give out instructions on how to present the brand - so most community managers may not have created brand guidelines in the past. But even if they haven’t, they should be able to tell you what strategies they worked on in collaboration with the brand team to make sure that the brand resonates with the community.
In your opinion, what are the top communication channels for Web3 community management and why?
The purpose for asking this question is to gauge the applicant’s knowledge on community channels. While it is a subjective question, your ears should be listening for three magic words: Twitter. Discord. Telegram. These places are where the Web3 community has a stronghold and is found to interact regularly. There could also be some other channels where the applicant has built or seen communities being run, but always remember to ask why they’re at the top and what makes them effective.
Discord has an integrated moderation feature, community building capabilities, verification tools, sub channels and voice channels, and compatibility with web3 tools and platforms.
Twitter has a large crypto audience from anywhere and everywhere, making it a global hub for crypto discussions and updates. It has the ability to make projects and companies trend, go viral and be discovered.
Telegram has secure and private messaging with end-to-end encryption, communication channels like group chats and channels, integration with Telegram bots for automation, and the ability to conduct ICOs and token sales on the platform.
What are your community success metrics and how do you monitor and record them?
The purpose of this question is to see what kind of metrics the applicant looks for when calculating success, what methods the applicant applies in order to analyze data and if they have any proficiency in analytics tools for particular channels. For Discord, Telegram and Twitter, the following could be the top success metrics to track.
Discord: engagement rate, number of new members joining, % change in member numbers for a given time, number of active members per week, % weekly average sentiment per week, segment behavior and top user of the week. Such metrics can be tracked through advanced Discord analytics tools like Blaze, Sanka and StatBot.
Telegram: number of new members joining, engagement growth rate, community growth rate, user activity rate, comments, reactions, community engagement score (ratio of active members to total membership), reach, number of online mentions, sentiment score, reputation score and presence score. Such metrics can be tracked through advanced Telegram analytics tools like Brand 24, TGStat, TeleMe and Zelkaa.
Twitter: follower count growth, engagement rate, impressions, link clicks, number of retweets and replies, mentions, etc. Such metrics can be tracked through Twitter Analytics, but for advanced third-party tools community managers can also make use of SproutSocial, Brand 24 and Social Pilot.
Tell me about some community growth and engagement strategies you used in the past.
The purpose of this question is to judge an applicant’s skills, abilities, and how they plan and strategize for communities with the help of data. As one of the core responsibilities of a Web3 community manager, experienced applicants should be able to tell you how in order to address lowering engagement and retention, for example, they incentivized participation through tokens and then they made participants feel valued by assigning higher roles or badges as a way of thanks.
Several other strategies like coming up with virtual and physical events, partnerships with community members’ institutions, member-generated content, Q&A sessions can all contribute to community engagement and should pop up in the applicant’s answer.
How do you strike a balance between the company and the community?
The purpose of this question is to learn how the applicant prioritizes stakeholder needs. A community manager is the bridge between the community and the company, so they have to keep interests of both in mind and decide what steps to take accordingly.
What’s a difficult decision you had to make on the job?
The purpose of this question is to get the applicant to dig deep, open up about their conflict resolution abilities and describe their soft skills. This can help you understand how they will act in a time of crisis, whether it’s about changing community guidelines, revising any community campaigns, or banning a community member who broke the rules and is not happy about being kicked out.
This question is not specific to the Web3 community manager, rather is routinely asked as part of other interviews in every other job imaginable. Recruiters like yourself should make sure in that same spirit that the person you want to hire as a Web3 community manager is courageous, empathetic, a team player along with holding other professional qualifications and experience.
We hope this is enough to help you hire a Web3 community manager. Scroll up 👆🏻 to the top of the page to explore and hire Web3 community managers available for work.