It's no big secret that the onbording process to hive could work better and be more successful. The fact is that there are not so many new accounts created and even less people really jumping on the hive train lately. So what could we do better? In fact, we once had a solution already that worked pretty well...
In a liotes mission some time ago, we asked the people how they joined Hive in the first place. It wasn't surprising to see a lot of people who started their hive journey by creating a splinterlands account. Another quite impressive quantity of people actually joined hive through the CTP community. This was the community led by @jongolson that was promoting hive as a solution for internet marketing. You can check the post and go through the comments to see how many people actually came to hive over Click Track Profit.
Hive brings a lot of factors that can be very useful for internet marketing. It offers a free webspace where we can post content, it offers a community and above all it offers ways to monetize our content and our time.
The CTP Team was very prolific and among many other projects, they built a tool called the The Hive Guide. It was an online course that was explaining the basics of hive and introducing several hive projects. People could sign up to this course for free and then promote this course with some affiliate links. At the time, the course didn't get much support from the hive community but it was actually quite successful. When signing up, people also landed on a mailing list where the activities of the community where promoted.
The problem with this course was that at the time, things on hive were evolving very fast and it required a lot of work to keep the course up to date. Since it didn't provide a reasonable income for the team, the project was more or less abandoned.
Why was this onbording tool better than many others?
When this tool went live, there was a very active CTP community and I was part of it. The team was creating several weekly shows, there were challenges, there were rankings and regularly new stuff came out.
In my opinion, the success of the project was that it went further than just making somebody sign up to hive. After the sign up, new users were taken through the course and had most important factors explained through videos. In a second step, these new hivians were offered a very intense community life that was constantly marketed through e-mails. There were the shows, the challenges, the rankings. For new people, it was very easy to make the first steps into community and very quickly they were adopted by the other members.
It was a mixture of teaching the basics, leading people into an existing community and showing them how they could be successful on hive, that made a lot of people quite serious hive users and quite a few of them are still active today.
What is needed for a successful onboarding process?
If I had to sum it all up, to make hive onboarding successful, we don't just need to make people sign up. They need a basic instruction how things work, they need to be integrated in an active community where they can build relationships and they also need to see a way to evolve and a motivation to grow on hive.
For a successful onboarding process we need:
- An easy way to create an account
- A process that teaches people how hive works
- A working community with challenges, shows, interactions for user retention
- A process that shows people the purpose of growing their account and what goals can be achieved
This infrastructure should be in place before any type of external marketing is done. Only once this is in place, it would make sense to market this process and bring people to hive.
At the moment, most projects that aim to onboard people try to make marketing on other social networks to bring people to hive. Unfortunately, the retention rate of this is very low and very few people are still around some time down the road. I can't help feeling that we are wasting resources while doing so. Why not replicate something that worked in the past?
For the future of hive, we not only need new people that sign up to hive but we need people who want to build something in the long run, who want to build their reputation and their stake.
With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.
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