5 February 2023
14 Min Read
Will a true influencer call you First
“Who is among the Top YouTube influencers?”, “The best TikTok influencers are…?”, “What influencer is the best fit for your product?”, “Which influencer can bring you the best outcome?” — these are the questions that inevitably occur in any new crypto space dweller’s head. And that’s just the ordinary, normal questions, not a rocket science since we, people, are constituted in a way that requires categorizing things – information, and well, people. Don’t tell us that’s not true;)
What is the favourite way to categorise something that people just love? Right, TOPs. And agencies are happy to create them. TOP NFT influencers, TOP YouTubers, TOP crypto influencers, etc.
We weren’t an exception: at the very beginning of our work we saw exactly these questions slowly hover in our thoughts. Acting on those questions though almost cost us thousands of dollars. Spoiler: we’ll tell you about that at the end of this article.
Disclaimer: if you are looking for the best influencers just for the sake of checking what is out there or to followed few leaders of thought, we can’t relate, really. But. If these questions occur because you need to find an influencer to promote your product, well, it is your lucky day: we would be crazily happy to have this article at the beginning of our path. But this lucky dude is you!
To save your money and time, let’s turn on a mode called “critical thinking”.
We often refer to this thing in our articles, so we’ll do it here as well: let’s perform a little thought experiment.
Let’s figure out who can be a great crypto influencer?
Is it someone from the “Top KOLs list”? Not really.
For you, it could be your friend, maybe coworker, who doesn’t even have social media, but he managed to gain some money from crypto and his story has captured your mind – you also entered crypto space thanks to the wave of inspiration from that person.
Now, imagine that this guy or a girl is creating an account. So, in order to influence more people this person has to be someone who really makes money from crypto. So, this account – probably, on YouTube – is just a hobby, no more. It could be monetized, but there is no direct need for that.
You started to understand, right? A really good crypto influencer won’t be looking to get 600 bucks for his ad; he won’t dm you to start collaboration offering services. This is simply impossible: any influencer is in no need for that. Why? Because a real crypto influencer make money on crypto itself; everything else is just a hobby.
This is probably the main difference between crypto and non-crypto influencers.
When you are looking at the list of top crypto influencers, reflect on the criteria for that top. If there’s now ranging – for instance, in terms of numbers, like a number of subscribers – you are probably looking for the author’s subjective thoughts. Maybe the top of that guy isn’t that good for you, since your values are unlikely to be the same, right?
The bottom line is next: are you as the influencer manager can benefit from that list or not?
When the TOP lists are not just a name dropping piece, but something useful?
Right, no matter how subjective it is, you still have a possibility to learn more about the forces in the world of crypto influencers. So, most of the tops can be just a list of those who have an impact on the crypto sphere. For example, Vitalik Buterin – it is impossible that he wasn’t affecting the crypto world, because he has founded the technology that changed the whole field. People listen to him.
Or say, Elon Musk, always in the center of attention, he just can’t not be an influencer.
However, if you need influencers for your product, both Elon Musk and Vitalik Buterin won’t be a big help for you. So is such a list of top influencers. The main pain of influencer managers is thriving here: influencers are not answering them. Do you think Buterin and Musk will be an exception?
Basically, it’s just a list of influential figures, and none of them is going to reply to you.
How to avoid being the victim of a "TOP influencer"?
Why on earth could the TOPs of influencers be harmful?
Right now there is no clear distinction between top influencer/not top influencer. Thus, if you stumble upon a list of influencers from the amator or just start looking for influencers by yourself, without proper criteria… you can get yourself into trouble. It is not like we are kidding here.
Ever since the crypto area ceased to be just a small community thing, and became playing with mass adoption, a new type of fraud appeared: “act like you are a top influencer”.
If you have just started as an influencer manager, or simply lost focus for some time, you can really fuck up on this thing.
Cheat subscribers
The cheat subscribers is one of the most common things right now: there are a gazillion platforms that offer such services. And yet, influencer managers are falling for that. For the obvious reasons though.
Reply rate from crypto influencers is usually low (due to the theorem of Buterin-Musk, if you will). So if you want to launch an influencer campaign asap and especially for first time, you’ll probably contact the influencers that reply super quickly and get you a series of ads. The problem is that these guys usually aren’t interested in making great integrations, they are just… scammers under cover.
This guy is familiar to every old fag in the cryto world, since he’s been one of the first who would push the wheel of cheat subscribers – Professor crypto. Despite the fact the old crypto ones know him well, all the time he has new projects advertising coming.
Lifehack no one would tell you about getting cheat subscribers "busted!"
1. Stability of views
YouTube is a very smart system. So, if your video for years has many views, it simply won’t allow to score such a number.
So, if you see such drastic view changes, especially if the last one didn’t hit certain stats, it is obvious that the previous number was due to the cheat subscribers. Something that usually makes influencers methods transparent.
With 409k subscribers hitting the 849 views is absolutely impossible due to YouTube’s algorithms.
2. Check other influencer’s social media
If the real people follow an influencer, he must have some sort of fun club. And it can’t be YouTube – because it is not a platform for communication. That’s why true, quality influencers have either telegram or discord community. Our insight: the best worked Telegram channels that “borrowed” the audience from YouTube. Because there you’ll see true fans – people who live to see new posts or a video from the favourite internet star. So, we recommend you to get suspicious if there are no other social media. Wait, don’t rush.
Here the thing: not always extra social media pages is a good thing. For example, professor crypto.
There is a tool called botometr, which as you might get, helps to find all the bots in a certain channel. If you apply it to a Professor’s Twitter page, you’ll see a curious thing: the number of cheat subscribers is at its most. In this case it is 90% of subscribers and comments aren’t…real.
3. Subscribers growth
It is quite easy to get mistaken here. What we see here is a seemingly smooth increase of subscriber’s. But the blindness problem of such tools is that they would show you the progress of the last few years, without checking what was before.
This channel was created in 2018. Even though the tool showed us that he started from 100k followers, 150k+ growth looks dubious.
4. Channel’s relation to the subscribers language
Let’s take a look at the geo in comparison with the language of the channel. It is English. Literally always channels in English have the first two English speaking countries in stats. Turkey or Spain have their own bloggers. Why would such a big number of Turkish and Russian users would actively follow this channel all of the sudden? It can’t be higher than the English speaking audience. Most likely he just uses the tool with a big number of Turkish bots.
5. Notable followers
This section is useful to test the channels with a few thousands of followers. Why? Sometimes KOLs could be in a small circle of crypto leaders and they create channels just for fun or out of hobby. And all these big shots from the crypto sphere start to follow them.
In the case of professor crypto everything’s fine. His notable followers aren’t bots 😉
But 70% of these dudes are probably his students who take do the same sh*t as he does.
But still you can use this section to understand who you are dealing with. Most likely an influencer with a big number of LOLs just a part of a narrow circle full of crypto professionals. So, if the small channel have many notable followers, it is most likely a quality one.
However, if the channel is really big and there are no notable followers, well, call the crypto karma police: cheat subscribers in the building!
6. Channel development
Every business should progress over time. So, many channels in a year or two completely change their content due to the fact that they learn a lot during this time: from the audience’s feedback, from what ad managers suggest, etc. Again, in the case of professor crypto we can compare two videos: the one posted four years ago, and the one posted now. They are practically identical. Which is impossible for the quality channel.
7. Would you watch that content with lots of alternatives?
Simple question that can encompass yourself in the right direction. Is this content really appealing to you? Is this better than many alternatives you have? Believe me, that can be enough sometimes.
Professional gathering of cheat subscribers
Professor crypto is the best example of how NOT to use cheat subscribers. However, many channels honestly make great content, they put a lot of time and thoughts into that, but at the same point they go by a dubious path of getting some cheat subscribers. The reasons could be different: to hit the tops list, to bear the competitors, or win out advisers.
Sometimes this way of getting cheat subscribers is way more subtle and hard to reveal. This is probably the main reason why you should ask for help from a crypto influencer agency. It will save you ( if the agency is really good) from paying for your own mistakes and paying to scam influencers. There are big chances your competitors already paid that price.
Today analyzing a crypto influencer without expensive tools is almost impossible. The agencies already have retrospective data and they see real outcomes of the influencers performances. That’s why you have more than steady reasons to contact Solus.b.
Another way is to analyse internal influencers YouTube analytics. But to request it, you must have some relationship with a certain influencer. So… it will take resources without promising anything particularly delightful.
Such manipulations with the influencers you already work with is vital to perform. And… could we leave you without a guide for the internal influencers’ analytic? Noooo way.
Acting like a top influencer or a sheep that put over lions teeth
“Hello, I am Louis Thomas, I am among the best influencers in crypto. I heard about your agency: top-notch, you guys! Would love to work with you”.
Now, scratch your head, and try to recall the definition of an influencer we gave you earlier. Is it really possible that a blogger with a great demand would dm you first? Why? Why would he do that?
Sure, there are reasons. Maybe in the case if your product among the first 5 on Сoinmarketcap. Okay, could be the reason for writing to you, you deserve it, very good.
But, even if you are an influencer manager that has been in the first 5 of coinmarketcap, but your contacts don’t really glow anywhere, I’ll give you my word: you’ve been scammed.
Louis Thomas is one of those who regularly attend crypto conferences, and lectures. Before deleting all of his videos for reasons that remained dark to us, he was a really respected crypto influencer. He would never reply to email letters. We tried:) For months, from different accounts, but the answer was silence. So, you see, it would be extremely weird if he would dm us by himself all of a sudden. I mean, W-H-Y?
Now, prepare to hear the truth. Be careful — every top influencer has its own doppelganger. Double. Someone that pretends to be a crypto influencer.
Here’s what is going to happen if you try to find an influencer just by his nickname all by yourself.
Lifehack: no matter how high your KPI, how many influencers you would have to attract over a period of time NEVER communicate with influencers on the pages other than officials. Even if somehow you find a telegram contact of an influencer that is not on his list of contacts on the YouTube page, we recommend you demand to confirm himself.
If he’s a “real” influencer, he’ll understand you. Just because he knows how many fake pages there are.
Also, a small remark: if you get an email from an official address from the influencer, it also could be fake. How to check it? Write to him by yourself and get a “reply” form, otherwise, don’t believe everything you see.
Irrational pricing
It is not a question of scam, rather the absence of rules of the normal pricing on the market. Since the crypto influencing market hadn’t its revolutionary times, it is entirely unregulated. Many projects just pay to much them, without understanding the normal price.
Let’s put it this way: influencers out their prices literally from nowhere. It is not literally a scam, but it is the same as you would come to a certain platform to buy bitcoin for 20k, but they put a different price for it – 120k. But why would you buy it for such a price, if you can do it for less money with better tools?
As an agency we decided to change this situation and shaped basic pricings. For the influencers we usually work with these are recommendations on pricing. If you need real market prices for influencer services that would really make a difference in the terms of ROI, download a guide and put a right price tag.
Influencer's irrelevance to your product
This is not a scam at all. But sometimes even the best influencer, with the best internal analytics just isn’t on the same page with your values.
A simple illustrative case from our experience: DataDash, great, very conversion-driven influencer. We worked with him in collaboration on the DeFi project 1inch. And… even though he’s really cool, conversion was poor. Wanna know the reason? It’s just that he’s been talking about Bitcoin for four years. So, his audience is not interested in the exchanges, best platforms to swap. Why? Because they are interested exclusively in Bitcoin.
Such a subtle state of mind comes with experience. Don’t spend your money when you can contact the agency and get the best from the experience that you didn’t pay for.
Who is the best influencer in the world?
Let me tell you a bit of a preach.
“There was a girl named Prudence. She had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning, looking for the only thing she craved: a framework for life. Having not found it in her musings, she went to a palmist. He advised her to live a certain way, which she tried to, but eventually that framework didn’t work well for her. Then she asked for advice from a fortune-teller, tried it, but also failed. Finally, she went to a witch, and said: “what is a framework for my life?” And the witch croaked a reply “it depends “.
So, “it depends” who is the best influencer in the world for you. You can acquire it by testing hypotheses and scaling the best of them. But if you want more than a croaked answer, contact us – we can help you to find YOUR best influencer.
The examples of NOT TOP influencers that can be TOP for your product
It depends, yeah, but what can you start with? Wait, wait.
From 2017 we have tested hundreds of influencers, and some of them helped a lot for some of our clients.
This is just a little percentage of influencers that can be useful for you, but the bigger list you can see on the link
Telegram
Tiktok
Sorry, if you were looking for the list of influencers that is easy to contact within two minutes and launch an integration that will bring you millions of followers, but found this article. Even if that was real, someone would do this before you.
Like any worthy thing, influencer marketing requires time and effort. To find an influencer is only part of the thing; the other part is to forge proper content.
In the end it is a matter of making your own list of influencers that is valid for your business.
If anything comes up, you know where to call (Solus agency) 😉
Ready to lead the list of crypto projects?
Use your chance without taking the risk!