Content Creation on Farcaster
Aired Date
November 20, 2024
Hosts
Series
Farcaster 101
Episode
Module 9
Watch on YouTube
https://youtu.be/Nztq_wCIWxsfarcaster 101 is an educational series brought to you by gm farcaster in partnership with snickerdoodle building off of their state of farcaster report which you can access at snickerdoodle.com this 12 part series introduces all aspects of the farcaster ecosystem and helps you get started building your social graph and brand on farcaster
gm farcaster we are back for farcaster 101 module 9 about content creation and you're here with nonnoshprophet adrienne and just a reminder this series we are quite a few modules in so if you are brand new to farcaster and found this one first i definitely would take a step back go back to module 1 if you are already on farcaster you're familiar then starting here is probably fine so adrienne are you ready to talk about some content
yeah let's do
it alright let's jump in so we're going to in this module we're going to talk about how to cast content stats and different types of casts and then in module 10 we're gonna go into more best practices show you some of our favorite casters talk about different types of content that works well on farcaster and we'll also dive into brand accounts and how they tackle farcaster a little differently than other platforms so just to kind of level set casts are the new tweets so here's an example from adrianne talking about farcaster 101 so essentially when farcaster launched it was a text based type of platform there weren't even you couldn't even share images at first the ad has come over time video came a little bit later and so you will see sort of focus and a high like more highlighting on the actual text based type of casts but one thing to note as well is that links on farcaster and warpcast are not penalized in the algorithm so what i mean by that is a lot of other social media platforms will either hide or not highlight tweets or posts that have links in them that take you outside of their platform they also have sort of done different things by building in browsers into apps so that you don't leave so with farcaster there's not as much focus of trying to make sure you don't leave it's okay you can share links you won't be penalized for that content and also other types of content that we're going to talk about in terms of different ways to present that information
and adrienne maybe you can talk about some of these stats that we're seeing here with snickerdoodle and this came from snickerdoodle's state of forecaster report in 2024 and maybe you can just chat a little bit about this
yeah so what you're seeing here is data from the farcaster hubs on kind of how frequently people are casting and and really this follows the 1% rule or you might know it as the 99 one rule of other social networks which says typically 1% of a of a social network is making most of the content so it's like 90% of the people are lurking 9% tend to kind of like lightly engage maybe reply like a cast but it's really a very small percent of people who are the ones creating actively creating the bulk of the content and and farcaster is no different than other ones so on farcaster you'll see that most of the users this was from the snickerdoodle state of farcaster report from that dropped in about september of 2024 most of the users were only lightly engaged casting fewer than 25 times per month and and and only 1.1 percent of users were casting more than 250 i would call out if you're new to farcaster really just any social network this should be a huge opportunity because competition is small there's only a small percent actually creating content so i encourage people like really lean in and cast and create content because there's tremendous opportunity for people who do that and i think and myself are examples of of that
sure we you don't even wanna know like definitely we're we're in that top percentage for sure by a lot holding things up here but it is i think the and we'll talk about this more in our next module but to highlight your point huge opportunity here for especially if you have a niche focus that nobody else is talking about you're gonna find a an interesting an interested audience that you can capture their attention for sure this is from the barcaster explore dune dashboard and this is kind of looking at trending words and topics and this is something you can actually look at it does change over time but this dashboard is super helpful for checking out different different content categories and different stats about the content that we see on farcaster and it can be super super helpful when you're trying to understand what's happening there so you can see trends in terms of words and what is trending at the moment dgen is always trending a lot as we talked about in our last episode our last module tipping and the tipping culture does drive a lot of that content so it might be very simple what it's picking up on is just a tip where i might say you know loved that cast you know 111 degen dollar sign degen and that's what you're gonna see picked up on you'll also see various words in all different languages because there is it is a global platform and there is a huge concentration coming from the asian market as well so there's a lot of that happening as well and then you'll see things like moxie and farcaster and different different words that are happening but more important what else what else you'll also see on this dashboard is the farcaster users by tier and this was a ranking and strategy created by elami at dune and he set this up he's he was the head of the dune wizards for a while there and he kind of created this metric to measure how somebody was creating content what level they were at and it included engagement in that as well and a certain type of engagement score so you have vips who are sort of at the top of this list they get a lot of engagement have a lot of followers and cast a lot and then you have influencers star active and npc meaning they don't cast really anything at all and there's this kind of really demonstrates
what
we were just talking about in terms of the 99 one rule is what you're seeing right here in terms of activestar and then you have this large group that's npc and not really doing anything at all but also again this highlights the opportunity right this is a small number of folks who are driving a majority of the content on the platform there's plenty of room for others to carve their niche out here you can also see who exactly is active and what channels are active which we'll talk more about next time but you can see all the active users you can see trending farcaster users you can sort this by how long they've been here on the on farcaster etcetera and you can also track your own stats as well but this also gives you a really good list of folks to follow because you know that they're they're producing a lot of great content if it's getting this level of engagement so there we go
excellent and i'll get just two pieces of advice if you end up and we'll link this dashboard so you can kinda play in it but we covered this in a previous module but i'll say it again follow a lot of people so yeah i think there's a little bit of a meta in other social networks where people try to they they think it's more important to have more people following you than who you're following no one gives a crap about that at farcaster the best thing you wanna do for an early forecaster or an early social network is like follow a ton of people because the network's still pretty small and you wanna be able to learn as much as possible so that's the best path i did early on
i i think for my 1st year i was following way more than i was that were them were following me and that was until very recently until about a year ago
yeah and you can always trim back later but just don't don't over index don't try to create or cultivate the perfect feed with the perfect number of followers just follow a ton of people and and these dashboards are a good resource and we have but there's a few others we'll show later in the module where you can kind of that will tell you who are good people to follow and then the second piece of advice is on the word cloud like nanesh prath was explaining this is just pure what are the words that are most frequent really interesting i think to see but just to reiterate it it lacks context and so i'm gonna give a shout out if you want to know kind of keep a pulse of what is contextually interesting and what contextually people are talking about on forecaster we host gm forecaster which is a 3 times a week livestream news show about forecaster so when you're done with forecaster 1 on 1 you wanna subscribe to that because that's a good way as well to stay up to date in terms of like what content is popular and what people are talking about on caster absolutely
yep i agree that's the best way to keep up on what's happening is us watch us we'll keep you up to date and we talked a little bit about this already farcasters star users drive engagement we just showed that dashboard where you can see a lot of the content is coming from that vip influencer and star categories that's the bulk of it but it's not the bulk of the users' user base so there's plenty of room plenty of room to grow
plenty of room and we should actually also point out that that dashboard was not created by the core farcaster team correct just like so many things that we've been pointing out farcaster is permissionless and composable so that means anyone from anywhere can build analytics graphs apps on top so so that dashboard we showed was completely
unrelated to the the core team it was just someone built it for for the good of the community
same with the state of our cast report so snickerdoodle built that without permission from the team did their own surveys plus took the on chain data and was able to do that all permissionlessly and build this report out that we're using as a basis of a lot of events today so the way we've kind of been structuring some of these have been to add a little bit of that data and information in and then get a little more practical in the second module so that's what we're looking at today and this also kind of speaks to creators dominate the space in other words it is those who are building things so creator being a very sort of large encompassing term of developers creators content creators media artists a whole bunch of different aspects of this you do see dominating who are creating content on farcaster so you're gonna see a lot of art a lot of photography music but also a lot of dev discussions and very high level technical discussions and sharing things around that as well so there's quite a variety of different types of content but it's again leans into that builder energy we talked about earlier in one of our modules as well anything you wanna add to that here adrienne
nothing to add
alright moving on casting with frames so we mentioned there's different ways to create a cast we showed you the text based cast in the first one we'll talk about a couple others but one very popular method of casting is frames so whether that's coming from an external app that you take that link and it turns into a frame or you can use something like cast actions or composer actions to create a frame that you then cast and this can be some very interactive and popular content on the feed so this is another way to do this and you can either just be sharing a different frame that somebody else created like with paragraph which we're gonna talk about in just a minute or you can be creating your own through the neymar frame studio or something like that and i'll just direct you back to our modules on frames where we really dove into this in more detail that was modules 3 and 4 and that really dives into the how tos and everything about frames and all the different types of frames that you may want to cast as part of your content strategy
and this is just a little bit more about that variety of frames available to cast again you can well in that module you'll see we did demonstrate going into a cast clicking the 4 little boxes to create a composer to use the composer action to create your frame and that is what is demonstrated in this image right here this is an events.xyz frame so the information was created as part of a either part of a composer action or going to events.xyz and then sharing that link or doing it directly within the cast to create the event frame by entering in the necessary information and then it populates the frame itself so very popular way to share content on our caster anything else you wanna add about frames or using frames within your content that i may have missed or reminders
you didn't miss anything but just the reminder of frames are a way that kind of creates more dynamic interactive experiences within the feed definitely go back to modules 34 to to catch up on frames and there's there's no penalty for using frames you don't get a boost for using frames the algorithm doesn't care it's just a tool that you have you know to to create interactive and and dynamic content i think
yep exactly this kinda looks at the best times and days to cast and adrienne if you can take this one and just kinda talk about your thoughts on this and sort of our our best practices here
yeah i think this is always interesting to me because new people who come on to forecast are always wanting to know like when should i cast is it most active in the morning on weekends in the in the evening what about different time zones
this was the first time i've kind of seen seen that you look at the data and there's probably a little bit of a a variation there seems to be peaks midmorning and that's kind of us eastern time
from our experience though one i'd say early early on it definitely mattered because right farcaster was really small and and there were concentrations of people so i know people in asia or europe didn't have as much activity and it was like oh we're gonna wait for the us to wake up then we'll be able to get some engagement on our casts it's no longer like that so i think farcaster has activity around the clock
and and i think people new to farcaster if you kind of have especially if you have that kind of brand mentality of like i'm trying to get the most out of farcaster when should i cast our advice is just it doesn't matter anymore yeah so cast when you're active cast often and and and there tends to be activity at any time you need
yep i agree with that and you even if even looking at this chart it's not that dramatic yes there's there's a you know a peak here but it's not a dramatic difference because it is a global community you do have people who are very active who might be on the opposite side of the world as you so you may not be connecting with them live but they are likely to still see your casts later on and it's very rare that this comes into play except for i'd say if there's a live event happening or something like that that might be a different story but otherwise you know like when mike tyson jake paul mike recently it was just happening obviously when that's happening in real time the content related to that is gonna be more useful at that moment but that is pretty rare most of the time what you're what you're casting is not gonna be directly tied to a moment in time so when in doubt just cast it photos and gifs and videos can be shared in casts but one thing to note is that and this is gonna get a little tricky i'm i'm gonna say it in one way and then i'm gonna totally recorrect correct myself unlike other content platforms like facebook like twitter there isn't a built in gif app that you can just go to the little gif button click it and post it but you can actually cast them there is however a composer action where you can do that if you have a subscription to the hypersub that connects with that so you can actually add your own in there the other way you can share gifs is just by saving them to your camera roll and sharing them in a cast as a photo and that does work as well so couple different ways to do it it's just not built directly into warpcast itself video sharing oh yes video sharing is also available but it it was made widely available to anyone with a 10,000 fid or lower or by request and the reason for this is was just to ensure safety of video sharing and make sure that that content was safe for everyone also to create less work for the team to have to moderate that content and to be concerned about anything that might not be legally able to be shared on a social platform so kind of looking at the those who've who've been around for a while assume that you know if they're still here they're good to go so giving them the permission to to share that but then also being open to allowing others who have shown they have some good content to share and aren't gonna abuse the privilege so if you do not have access to share video and would like to tag us or tag dan dwr.eth and we'll see if we can help make that happen anything else to share on videos and photos and by the way videos can only be up to 5 minutes long so there is that limitation as well for storage purposes
yeah yeah maybe just a little context on why video isn't bigger and and i think the answer is it's just not yet because farcaster is a emerging social network they're trying to build a protocol build a new social network from scratch the core team is lean and they are very focused on kind of the priorities that they think will move the needle in terms of finding a product market fit so i think it was just recognition of it's gonna be very hard to compete against the tiktoks of the world or the twitters of the world that have seemingly infinite already kind of won a social network at scale and infinite resources so it's not because we don't like video it's just it hasn't been prioritized i think we will see more and more video apps we're see also seeing other video apps being built on top of the social graph like apps like dracula so that is why a lot of new pea new creators come in and immediately get freaked out because they can't upload videos so it it'll happen so just i i think just the reminder of forecaster still early and absolutely and and still being cooked
great point about dracula and also stream s t r e a m m stream dot tv i believe it is is another method or you can look for that account on warpcast is another method to share video as well so there is a couple different options out there dracula stream and then the in app on warpcast to be able to share video dragula is a great option and a great workaround so long form there are there is a limit on tweets tweets on casts and there is a limit on threading so unlike twitter where you can kind of line up your thread altogether as one thing you cannot do that directly in warpcast now i believe there are some other clients where you can do that i think i don't am i right there
yes you're correct there's other clients supercast is one that has native support for threading work cast does not have native support in terms of being able to create a thread and hit send all at once you can kind of create your own threads by casting and then and then reply replying to it right
that does work refresh in between so that you see the replies and make sure you're going to the next reply little bit more manual little bit more friction but can be done and then the other way to share long form content is by using different apps like paragraph paragraph is perfect for this you can write it at paragraph.xyz take your link once you publish it drop it into warpcast and boom you have your long form content right there it can be read directly in app so great option also if you share videos like a youtube video link within the paragraph post it will be able to be played within app so within the mini app that is the paragraph post so super useful if you're sharing things like a podcast for example these videos right here get shared within the accompanying paragraph post and you can watch the video while also looking at the other content right within the mini app
and then finally there are some rewards for good content on farcaster so good content is rewarded in a few different ways and the only one that's directly from the merkle team is the $5 usdc daily rewards for the top 100 casters based on an engagement score so the algorithm's choosing this it's not a manual choice by the team and a note on that this is a current experiment running as of when we are recording this we do not know if it will continue past the end of the year so just a note but there are 2 others that will continue on for at least the time being tipping via dgen and other chains such as ham in various ways that you can do this from individuals tipping to other individuals for the content they deem to be good and then moxie which is a built in cryptocurrency which we talked about last time that you're accumulating rewards based on your cast and who likes it recasts it or comments so a couple different ways that content can be rewarded and we also wanted to share this which is the top warp cast rewards dashboard so this is all the folks who have been rewarded for their content by the merkle team based on engagement and as you'll see this is a fantastic list again of people to follow and to interact with on the feed they tend to produce incredibly high quality content kekers being at the top of this list who we just love but also pretty much anybody who you see on this list including number 25 adrianne it's a good one to follow but all of these folks great follows and great people to interact with and this can give you a little bit of inspiration as well to hopefully do get some great content going and earn some rewards any other thoughts on that adrian
i love the rewards i love the idea of getting paid for content i think many people in kind of in the decentralized social space and web 3 social space feel that way and we're here because we've seen what happens with the web 2 social giants which is they've accrued a ton of value even though all of the users have created all the content most of the value gets dispersed around the corporate network and captured in the corporate network and not filtered through to the users who are creating content a lot of people come to farcaster and immediately assume like hey this is decentralized how do i get paid you're gonna pay me for my content you don't automatically get paid there's nothing that automatically makes it but because farcaster is a protocol built on crypto rails it makes it really easy to get paid and for other people to do it so these are just great examples of like we said that yes merkle and the workcast team as the core team is doing one experiment but there's other ones as well and even if some of these experiments end others will pop up so i just it's it's a really interesting space to be
i forgot about rounds as well there's a tool called rounds that is built in that has built on top of the farcaster social graph that allows for anyone to create sort of a reward pool and then have set certain criteria and then be able to manage those rewards being dispersed in a very seamless very easy way so lots of different ways to earn your great content on farcaster
and i'll offer i'll put out an offer if you're new to farcaster and you want to reward your community or figure out a way to provide rewards there's ways to do that rounds being won but ping nanish prop or me because we'd be happy to show you talk you through it if you are new to web 3 or i'd say if you're not new maybe this all makes sense to you and and you're used to it the world of decentralization i came from the enterprise kinda corporate world and i still find it interesting of like i want someone just to tell me here's everything you need to know about farcaster and it won't change and it's here's the centralized resource it doesn't exist and it it's impossible to create because every day there's new people building on top yep so it because it's not centralized there's no one source of truth of these are all the ways you can get paid for content on farcaster so that was like a little mindset shift for me that i had to embrace that it was like oh yeah well here's what it is today tomorrow might be different 3 weeks might be different but there's always going to be ways to get paid or there's things to be built so i i find farfaster to be this like incredibly exciting place to be as a user and a builder and as an educator it makes it a little difficult because we'd love to tell you everything you need to know except it keeps changing
so it keeps changing all the time
if you're new just embrace it embrace it embrace it and if you're not new to web 3 then you you understand that that's the way that's the way decentralization works yeah
and there's a lot of people building things in the background that just aren't ready to talk about it yet and it literally could be tomorrow we have a whole new thing and that happens all the time and it's to me the most exciting part of it but if you are uncomfortable with change or you know the unknown or whatever it's gonna feel a little but it's to me a lot of fun to see what people are gonna build and what's gonna happen next because we just never know we never know what's happening
you're uncomfortable with change get comfortable with change
get comfortable with change stay stay just get comfortable yeah
and in our next module we're gonna get into content creation best practices we're gonna show you a few different case studies of folks who we think have done amazing coming in brand new and becoming just incredible content creators and who are getting rewarded for that content as well and and showing kind of what they've done to boost their boost their engagement in a very organic and natural way and then we'll also just give you a few tips on how to approach that and best practices for your own content anything else adrienne before we sign off for this module
nothing else i think we covered it
alright thanks everybody and we will see you in module 10