Recently I started a project (hiveNaija fantasy football) to get more active users to hive from my demographic. The goal is to onboard at least 100 persons to the hive blockchain to strengthen the HiveNaija community.
To put things into perspective, the Fantasy Premier League is a community of about 9,000,000 members globally. This is an active community of football lovers and you would expect that any initiative geared towards bringing people in this community together would be successful, but it isn't as easy as it seems.
Above are the stats for a tweet I put out 20 hours ago. Compared to other tweets using the same tags, we are not doing so badly. The tweet has managed to gain some organic reach, but most of the accounts that have registered are old hive accounts. My goal is to onboard non-hive users.
From my observation, the major bottlenecks will be getting new and interested participants to sign up for a hive account. I made that compulsory in the Registration form and I will have to change it. The most important thing is getting people to join the league and getting their contact. I can work on getting them to sign-up for a hive account much later.
Aside from getting people to fill out the form, the major challenge is getting (interested) people to know the form exists. Organic reach has become increasingly difficult on most social platforms (except TikTok). If you are not an influencer or have a large following, it is near impossible to reach your target audience. This is understandable since most social media platforms rely on ad revenues to run their business.
So for small businesses and communities, it is almost impossible to scale. There are only two ways to solve this problem. The first is through word of mouth. Getting the people who use your product/service to start to other people about your service can be an effective way to create more awareness for your product/service and I will be trying this out in the coming weeks.
The other option is advertising. However, for someone who hardly views or clicks on ads, I don't see this as an effective method of getting people's attention. It is one thing to see something and a totally different thing to focus on it. So I would rather spend that money on improving my product/service and incentivising my existing customers/community to promote it because people pay attention to those they care about. The only problem with promoting an idea through word of mouth is that it can be painfully slow.
So it will be a slow and painful process to build a brand/service/product from the ground. It makes a lot of sense why many give up along the way or opt for paid advertising. Building requires a lot of work with no guaranteed positive result. This is a challenge every builder or founder faces and it takes a lot of courage to proceed with any endeavour knowing these facts.
CONCLUSION
Fortunately, many businesses/initiatives require the Internet today to reach their audience/customers. Many of these social platforms are not structured to help small or medium enterprises scale without paying for ads. Nevertheless, word of mouth is still a proven way to create awareness for your brand/product/service and it is more efficient than paid advertising.
I am looking forward to seeing how successful the Fantasy Premier League initiative will be. Now, I have the opportunity to apply all my supposed knowledge and tips on how to grow a community, and I will be documenting my experience as the season proceeds. Cheers!
HiveNaija-FPL is an initiative by the HiveNaija Community on the Hive blockchain which aims to connect Fantasy Premier League enthusiasts to the Web 3 space. For our first edition, we have a base prize pool of N100,000 naira which will be shared among the 10 Teams at the end of the 2023/2024 FPL season. There will be other prizes (jerseys, airtime and movie tickets) during the seasons for active community members who use the Hive decentralized social media platform to share their passion.kindly follow 
To register kindly follow the link below:
https://forms.gle/LCJvkNF1LndRtMAs5