Bitcoin Forum

I have been following quite many ICOs over the past year. To raise awareness and knowledge of potential investors and to create the hype, almost all of the bounty campaigns use Facebook (or Twitter) as the main social media platform. Theoretically, it's logical and good idea, but when looked more closely at these campaigns, they do not seem to be very efficient.

What to point out:

Staking system - the stake of a bounty hunter solely depends on the number of his/her friends/followers.
I grasp the idea - the more friends, the more views the post will (should) get. But in real life, someone who has 5000 friends in Facebook, refers to someone who has a fake account. Of course, there are exceptions, but it's very unlikely IMO, that a person with real 5000 friends, will attend in a Facebook marketing campaign, post (some would say spam, every day) to make a couple of hundred bucks.

In the other hand, a person, who has a relatively small Facebook friends group, let's say 200-500 people (all of the friends are real), is likely not going to participate in the Facebook campaign, because his stake is averagely 5-10 times smaller (depending of the ICO) than a person's stake, who has 5000+ friends.

Let's take an average ICO, who spends 1,5% on the bounty campaign. Their goal is to raise 10 million USD. 1,5% of 10 million is 150 000 USD.
Facebook campaigns are usually between 10%-20% of the whole bounty budget. Which would be 15 000-30 000 USD.

So this staking system creates a situation, where ICOs are spending tens of thousands of dollars on Facebook bounty campaigns, but do not really get quality marketing for the money.

I'd like to raise a question - are there better ways to run a Facebook or social media campaign? An option would be to make an equation, which would consider the likes&shares, friends number, the quality of the post and bounty manager overall subjective rating.

It might look something like that:

Stake count =(10  + 1 + 1 up to 6  + 1 up to 10 )x 0,1 up to 1,5

10  - likes
1 - shares
1 up to 6 - friends number
1 up to 10  - quality of the post
0,1 up to 1,5  - bounty manager subjective rating

(10+1+ 6 +4) x 0,3 = 6,3

The bounty hunter would receive 6,3 stakes for his work.

I'd be happy to get some opinion about the equation and arguments, how to turn Facebook bounty campaigns more profitable for the ICO.

I also often see the number of facebook friends over 5000+ and that some are not active.

For answer your question (are there better ways to run a Facebook or social media campaign? )
I think running it in facebok and social media is very good where now social media is widely used, and stakes calculations in my opinion better based on the quality of post we make with our own language about ICO project that we follow, it will give good marketing to the project and attracted many investors.

You have to keep in mind that you have to share and post a lot (!) when you take part in Facebook campaigns. So you are spamming others Facebook walls and a lot of your "friends" will unfollow you.

Completely agree with that and that's why I think giving stakes only based on friends number isn't the best option

Hmm, I don't think so. I joined bounty campaigns many time before and yet I'm not experiencing to be unfollowed 'til now.
But you can't blame why Bounty Campaigns work the way like that. Of course it's natural for an ICO to want their project make a traffic as huge as possible, right?
That's why giving of rewards on that kind of campaign depends on your friends simply because the more people who can see their advertisement, the more chances for their coin to be sold.

Actually, I don't understand why you are pointing out the difference of real and unreal friends. In advertising, personal connection to your friends doesn't matter a lot (IMO), the number does :).  

If the campaign manager requires to do so then your inquiry will be satisfied.

when it comes to marketing, it doesn't depend on how many likes you got or how many share it depends on how many people you will reach and introduce profesionally the project you are promoting.

In marketing the quantity of marketers are important because that is also a way that says and proves that a project has quality. 

You seem to be mistaken about several things. 1) Bounty campaigns spend little to nothing on promotion. 2) Bounties are a great way to promote their campaigns. Yes, it might not be a truly efficient way to advertise but it doesn't need to be. ICO campaigns print their own money for free then give it away to anybody who will spam their ICO over as many platforms as possible. True, a lot of them will be advertising to nobodies or fake friends, but it doesn't matter. All they want or need is for their name to be spread out there and hope they catch some fish. What they're essentially doing is walking around with a loudspeaker shouting about the product across half the internet. Of course, half of the time it will fall on deaf ears but not always. There's always going to be idiots who want to get rich quick on the next big thing and there's always more bounty hunters that are all too eager to promote anything as long as they can get pennies out of it. As long as one person hears it then it's money well spent for the ICO (or not spent seeing as no money has been spent when you create your own for free).

Let's use this analogy: Think of ICOs like dandelions:

https://images.fineartamerica.com/images/artworkimages/mediumlarge/1/1-dandelion-seeds-bess-hamiti.jpg

Dandelions spread out thousands of seeds via the wind in the hope that a few of them will find ground and spout a new plant, but many of them just end up wasted falling by the roadside or on the pavement or rotting in water etc. But a few will make it and a new plant will quickly grow with thousands more seeds to spread. ICOs are the same. They have thousands of people spreading their word but most of it is worthless and goes to waste, but they will get one or two hits that find worthwhile and fertile ground. Those users will then carry on the promotion or invest themselves and spread the same message thousands of other times and the cycle repeats. And this is why advertising doesn't need to be targeted; they just need to get their name out there and they will land some success and no money has been wasted in the process if you've printed your own monopoly money.

Hey Guybrushthreepwood, thanks for your long reply. I agree with you that bounty campaigns are a great way to raise money for the ICO.

You have a very good example of dandelions, except there's one big difference. Dandelions, cannot change their way of distribution. They cannot make their distribution more effective.
On the other hand, ICOs can, and in my opinion, they should. Doesn't matter that they ''print money''. Investors are buying the stake in the company, and I'm sure that most investors wouldn't want that their hard earned money is spent ineffectively.
Just because the bounty manager is ''playing'' with someone else's money, doesn't give him/her the right to spend it ineffectively.

Neither can ICOs change their advertising model because they don't have the advertising budget to do it. The money you invest in these companies is not invested in anything and 99% of the time the money just goes directly into the pockets of people who are running the ICO and that's all they're for. The guise of the ICO is just some sham to make people think they're investing in something worthwhile so they give them some money. ICOs only advertise in the places where they can get away with doing it for free. What effective ways do you think they should be spending it? As I said, they don't care as long as they're blasting their name out there in any way they can and via bitcointalk, Facebook and twitter etc is essentially the only way. They're spam campaigns at the end of the day that want to reach as far and wide as possible, and not some sophisticated advertising campaign promoting an established or up and coming brand. Most of them are fly by night scammers who want as much money as quickly as possible and then to run with the money. They spam their message in as many places as they can and hope they catch some flies. They can't do specific targeted advertisements on say YouTube or Facebook because they cost money and they can only pay people in monopoly money that they've created themselves so that's why they're limited in what they can do and that's why paying people to spam facebook/twitter is the only way.

Saying that 99% of ICOs are scam is false. To run a campain, that has been well thought through you don't need an actual budget. And that's what I'm suggesting,  that Facebook campaigns should be more efficient

I'm not going to get into the semantics of what the true exact percentage of ICOs are scams, but by scam I mean any ICO that hasn't delivered what it promised and investors got little to nothing for their money, which is the vast majority of them whether it is much less than 99% of them or not. Can you really name more than a handful of successful ICOs that delivered on whatever product it was they were selling? Most of them are either scams from the get-go or they fail because it's some half assed attempt and they haven't thought it through properly, but it doesn't matter because they have your money anyway. They're just cash grabs at the end of the day and they might as well try because they have nothing at all to lose. If these people were serious about their business then they would just seek funding elsewhere or through the proper channels, but because ICOs are unregulated and are filled with greedy get rich quick schemesters they're prime for abuse and people are all too quick to throw their money at them.


But more efficient by how? And again, they don't care. They pay people just to get their name out there as fast as possible. They're throwing shit at walls and hoping that some of it sticks (which it inevitably does). They can't really be any more efficient than that because they don't have the time, money or expertise to do so. They just do whatever they can with their fantasy budget and so far that includes getting people to spam their name around for their made up tokens on social medias regardless of whether it's actually reaching the people in the most efficient way. 

The problem with your staking system is that when a bounty has maybe 2000 participants, it would become very time inefficient for the manager to have to calculate those stakes for each post from every person. The truth is, the more followers on a page and the more the posts are shared, the more coverage a project gets. there are so many projects out there now that seeing the same project name over and over again almost legitimizes that project in some regards. Atleast to the point where people will think it is a serious project and look into it more.

Nice post here. Thank you for raising this issue.

I would not agree more that Bounty campaigns may need a better structures. This is mostly because a user may "Use" many smurf spamming accounts and eventually he will get many stakes without doing his work correctly. These accounts are malicious and needs to be eliminated.

Moreover, Having 300 "real" friends gives more quality to the bounty than 1000 fake. These campaigns are very  tricky because social media accounts can be manipulated easily.
The No. of friends can be manipulated, No. of likes, shares etc. I am not sure how bounty campaigns can change in a different structure by i think something needs to be done. I am fed up with hunters that use multiple fake accounts in order to get more stakes.

in fact we can not detect fake accounts and spam friends that exist and this is a very complicated thing
and most of the facebook and twitter campaign hunters are fake accounts and these are used by forum users who use more than one account

that is true . some people say it's just rubbish, for people who do not really understand bitcoin / facebook campaign. i experienced it, my friend was initially 5000 but after i got into bitcoin world (facebook campaign) my friend poked (decreased) every month

There are already some ICOs that require participants to share quality comments to be rewarded, I think that currently social media campaigns are more demanding and that's fine to better achieve the objectives of spreading the word about the ICOs that we represent .
The example of guybrushthreepwood with the analogy: Think of ICOs like dandelions is a clear example of what happens with social media campaigns.

you are right with so the goal of bounty facebook campaign and twitter can be achieved only we hope as bounty hunter hope the percentage of gift distribution in added because more difficult this work with the addition of work done so we get paid accordingly

Far too biased. Examples:

"Many dollars are used by narcos, Dollars are bad"
"Some criminals use planes, planes should be banned"

Truth - People get into investing without any knowledge and then they blame the ICO, the teams, and the moon if necessary.

Truth - You lost your money because you don't have a hint about business, venture capital or investment analysis and you trusted the wrong people.

Truth - Had you invested 1000 USD in Ethereum on ICO you would be a millionaire now.

Note: The rate of success in ICOs is higher or at least similar than in Seed Investment or Venture Capital investment.

Stop blaming ICOs, start learning, become a bit more knowledgeable and then, invest.


@OP
At the moment, you should be more concerned about Facebook banning any kind of ICO promotion. Get another train before that.

I'm not sure how this is relevant to anything I said. I'm not saying ban them. The majority of ICOs are get rich quick scams, regardless of the small percentage of them that are for something actually useful or genuine. Most cash isn't used for crime either.


Truth - 99% of ICOs won't make you a millionaire. Again, one 'good' ICO out of 100 of them falls in line with 99% of them being rubbish or scams.

         A simulator should also be created on facebook to identify false accounts so that those who participate in the social media bounty campaign can only participate with friends with real accounts on facebook. Just how to identify the fake accounts on twitter, identify those on facebook.

Are there any simulators around?

engaging in facebook bounty, one has to be a very active facebook user, if not so one may miss out when the post to be shared is posted on the news feed by the ico,

I have participated in a number of ICOs during the last around 6-7 months.  My experience is not so good.  The amount earned even is insufficient to compensate the expenses incurred by me on the working.  ie. electricity charges incurred for lighting and air conditioner etc; internet charges are also yet to be reimbursed. 
Please note I am not adding my labour of around 7-8 hours a day.  But some of my friends said that they earned a lot here.  They are still working for ICOs.  I get motivated after seeing them working taking so much pain. 

I hope I may get some rewards in next few months.

In my opinion in this for me before I joined any bounty campaigns  I checked what is the amount funds or tokens to rewarded so if I see that there are hundreds and thousands of promoters, Well  its because you are only gaining small amount of tokens that worth 0.01$ a piece the members almost promote the ICO site for 2 months and the sad part is because they're a lot of supporters joined you only get  200+ tokens for 1k followers and friends. So its profitable to the team i guess.

You have made a very good post that will help bounty developers and mangers. Good work. However, there is a way bounty developers use to check how real your friends are. Fake friends are mostly rejected. Facebook campaigns might be very effective if bounty managers are really strict.

In my opinion, ICO developers dont care about your "real" friends number. They need promotion and spread out their project and news related with it. And mostly they get what they want. You shares, follows are enough even half your friends are fake on the list.

I think they need to reconsider the entire reward system, because translate campaign and youtube (for example) give a lot more tokens than facebook/twitter.

This.

And not only that but you ONLY get paid when the ICO finishes.

I believe most people willing to do those things are in countries where that money would really help them, waiting so much for a payment that is not sure(Depends on the Community Manager checking) is a big risk. Of course, there are some who use a lot of accounts - But that is another story.

Strongly agree the calculation analysis as you wrote, it shows that the bounty hunter really works for the ICO. a lot of work but the results are very unsatisfactory from ICO..
Especially if we are tired of working at the ICO and the results are very detrimental (not comparable) especially if the gifts we follow turn out to be fraudulent gifts after months of following them. In addition to considering likes & sharing, number of friends and quality of posts, maybe in the campaign must consider the number of participating ICO participants "restrictions on participants" so as not to follow too much and the result is a small division of ICO shares ...