At first glance, the list looked really promising.

I scrolled through a bunch of names and checked their massive reach.

Or so it seemed.

But I knew something was really off.

You see, picking influencers is not only about their follower base.

It’s a synergy.

In fact:

This was one of the very key things to reach that 800 million TVL.

Here’s why:

There’s 3 basic currencies out there:

- Money
- Audience
- Relationships

Money allows you to buy the things you need to grow.

That’s why you’ve probably secured your initial funding for a good time.

And if you didn’t yet, then it should be your first step.

Audience and relationships though…

Those are harder to get.

And even more powerful than funding itself.

Here’s why:

Let’s say you had one million hard-core, die-hard fans.

People who love you with passion…

They trust your judgment…

And they would follow you to the abyss itself.

How much time do you think you’d need to convince them to be part of your project?

Not much, would you agree?

Yet, here’s the caveat:

It takes time to build a relationship with an audience.

And influencers already did that!

That’s why securing their support is like “hacking time”.

The same happens with connections.

Influencers are connected, because everybody wants their attention.

In fact, most of our integrations and TVL growth happened through them.

That’s why I knew how important it would be to have influencers on board.

Hence, that list…

Now a couple of basic principles.

Follower count doesn't necessarily correlate with user reach.

For example:

A 30,000 follower strong influencer may bring more heat than a 150,000 account.

How can you tell?

Engagement is what really matters.

That’s why I never gave green light to that list.

First, I checked if those influencers actually talked about the Ecosystem I wanted…

And not crypto in general.

I also checked if there was a good comment ratio below the posts.

In other words:

If a guy has 100,000 followers yet only 5 retweets on most posts…

This means very little engagement (and small reach).

Most of the guys in the list had lots of followers, but no quality threads at all.

Another used shady tactics like tagging friends and getting freebie seekers with some dumb “retweet to win” promos.

All of that made me cross many names out of the list.

From there, I started asking myself the following questions (and you should, too):

- Do the influencers you work with express their own opinions?

- Do they do quality content, threads, videos and AMAs?

- Do they take care of their follower base, even if it means less income in the short term?

- Do they refuse to post threads they don’t agree with?

- If you ask them to post something, will they rewrite it adapting to their own style?

- Do they actively generate ideas and new connections?

Once you’ve checked most of these questions, things become much easier.

You can bring influencers to promote your announcements and important posts.

You can also ask them to say certain things… and help with content.

In fact:

People from my team even wrote posts for some key influencers…

And handed those to them when we needed to achieve specific goals.

And yeah…

Sorry to say.

Some influencers are too lazy to write posts when you need them the most.

Anywho…

All of this goes into the influencer schedule doc.

You already have one, don’t you?

Here’s another hack that only comes with practice.

Putting all of your influencers in one Telegram group is ok.

Asking to retweet everybody all the time and at the same time, will slowly kill that relationship.

It’s a synergy, remember?

Now the really good stuff comes when you convert influencer interaction into smart TVL- boosting campaigns.

Some of them include announcing milestones and making influencers promote carefully crafted rewards…

Asking to make a game with screenshots for social proof.

Announcing special perks pushed through the influencer channel…

And many, many more.

Hit me up to get your own influencer strategy put together.

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