Is "being active on Farcaster" a viable user acquisition strategy?

An easily affirmed idea is that being active on Farcaster is a reasonable acquisition strategy for crypto-consumer application developers wanting to reach out to new users.

This idea is easily re-affirmed by everyone on Farcaster because when you post there, the casts usually get a lot of engagement, and so it is reasoned that this engagement must somehow help in brand building and acquiring new users for the startup.

Well, it's wrong.

While all of this makes sense argumentatively, it cannot be observed in the Kiwi News data. A few data points from our Google Analytics of the last 90 days:

• Mac and I have been much less active on X than on Farcaster, yet the number of users acquired from X is the same as those having been acquired from Warpcast.
• The acquisition of users from X and Warpcast is minuscule as a percentage of the total number of acquired new users. Only 2-4% of new users respectively found their way onto our website through Warpcast and X (in the last 90 days, mind you). For comparison, I wrote one or two posts on the Optimism Governance forum in December, which also resulted in 1% of referrals for that period. But I spent much less time on that!
• Even clicks from Google top the new traffic acquisition over WC and X in that period.

Interpretation

1. It is unclear how much Google Analytics data can be trusted here. After all, it could be that outside clicks originating from the Warpcast app don't include the right referrer metadata and are, hence, not counted correctly by Google Analytics.
2. However, one could argue that the intention of Farcaster users to visit a related crypto consumer application is much higher quality than, for example, users coming from X or Google. Warpcast users already know what minting an NFT means, and they get the web3 vision. So they're potentially higher value.
3. Quantivatiely, these data directly oppose our qualitative findings where most newly minted Kiwi users report noticing our brand on Farcaster or through some memecoin drop. However, my explanation here is that Warpcast has an echo chamber effect where mostly the same old followers end up liking each others' posts, so no new users are exposed to content that could advertise the product. The exception is that actively reaching out to new user cohorts can really make a difference. Participating in the degen tips airdrop informs this argument as it exposed Kiwi News to a Warpcast-internal cohort that Mac, I, and the Kiwi News community on Warpcast hadn't managed to reach out to before. We got a lot of (temporary) and intentional interest. Many minted our NFT but weren't interested in using the product. Only a few converted.

Caveats

We have, of course, had some initial growth by acquiring Farcaster users. But this analysis mostly concerns itself with the numbers from the last 90 days to understand whether being active on Farcaster is a viable activity throughout the workday to justify "growing the user base."

Turns out it isn't an effective one.

While direct traffic can be grown by improving the product and its engagement, it seems like "being active on Farcaster" has topped out in its effectiveness. But there are some exceptions:

1. Being on Farcaster is useful for grasping the latest trends in the industry and quickly adjusting the product to fit that market's needs.
2. The X and Warpcast bots we bootstrapped (@kiwinewshq and @kiwi) didn't bring the expected engagement and retention boosts we intended them to have. This can also be qualitatively observed as those posts hardly gain any likes or retweets, and this leads me to think that their posts are simply not seen in many timelines.
3. Being on Farcaster can be useful for connecting with other crypto consumer builders. For example, having been featured as a criterion for the degen tips airdrop brought us many new users, of which few converted, but many also minted our NFT. But, their intention was pretty low.

Conclusion

We should carefully manage our time on Warpcast and X during work.

These apps are engineered to make it seem very beneficial to be "online" by frequently rewarding the active poster with dopamine hits.

The justification for spending time on there as "part of work" is an internally enforced affirmation that can, however, not clearly be backed up with the available data.

The technical investments (bots) that we've made in these platforms (both X and WC) have not panned out positively in such a way that they influenced our core metrics positively, like increasing Daily Active Users.

In fact, for the bots, there is also a question of whether our site's visitors would actually increase if we disabled the bots, as they're arbitraging original content submitted to Kiwi into the bigger platforms like Warpcast and X.

What do you think? Discuss in the KN comments!