Tools for marketing on Farcaster
Farcaster is home to a highly engaged and cheerfully experimental group of Ethereum natives. The total population remains small compared to, say, X, but Farcaster is a wonderful place to find "10x users" who will try your beta app, give earnest feedback, and try the next version too once you update. The culture embraces building in public and collaborating freely.
Granted, Farcaster has its quirks. The closer your product is to being a Farcaster-native mini app geared toward USDC on Base, the easier it'll be to get traction. But that's certainly not the only option. For example, Splits Teams is an entirely separate application and nonetheless Farcaster has been a meaningful source of growth and feedback. (The platform is rife with high-signal teams!)
The rise of Farcaster mini apps has led to a profusion of tools for promoting your project to the community. Most take the form of microincentives, a type of ad where you pay the audience instead of the platform (although sometimes the facilitating app takes a cut).
All of these tools allow you to buy or incentivize attention, whether targeted to a specific announcement at a specific time, or for the sake of ongoing engagement. Tipping is particularly useful for token projects as a means of drip-distribution to interested Farcaster users.
This is not an exhaustive list of Farcaster-native marketing tools, but certainly enough to get you started.
$QR
The highest minimum budget and the most clout. Winning a QR auction is a flex.
$QR is a cryptocurrency named after its QR code logo. The project runs an auction every day, a la Nouns. The QR code (and project website) link to the URL submitted by yesterday's auction winner.
The actual QR code is largely symbolic, at least for now. Winners are rewarded with valuable social media promotion on the project's X account, plus founder Jake's X and Farcaster accounts. (Jake is a mononym like Madonna.)
Notifications are sent to 40k+ Farcaster users who have added the QR mini app, with an incentive to check the link:
Winning the QR auction is a statement, and Jake will ensure that it doesn't go unnoticed. Often this move is paired with a launch celebration.
Amps
Amps is straightforward. Anyone can set a price (in USDC) that they charge for liking or recasting a post — a cost to amplify the original post. As a buyer you can select specific users, enabling some audience targeting based on the presumed makeup of their following.
Amps is beneficial when you have an announcement that you want to surface in a lot of people's feeds. Since the algorithm favors posts with lots of engagement, there is value in purchasing likes as well as recasts.
Tipping
Several services offer variations on the concept of "like to tip," which is another way to reward people who interact with your posts. The top contenders in this category:
Noice
Noice allows you to automatically tip any ERC-20 token, setting the precise amount for each type of interaction:
Noice also includes "super tips": replying or quote-casting with a specific phrase (of your choice) triggers a larger tip.
Super tips are handy for things like running meme contests directly in the feed. You could like or recast the best entries as an "honorable mention" category, then super-tip the actual winners by quote-casting them with the trigger phrase.
Here's an example of gathering product feedback through Noice.
Recently Noice enabled granular airdrops with an AI agent that parses natural language. See this in action, rewarding new followers of a specified Farcaster account.
Tipn
Tipn works pretty similarly to Noice, without the "any token you want" angle — the tips are USDC (which is honestly preferable as a recipient). Tipn does include the possibility of being allocated $TIPN from the project treasury, which you can then tip via comment (a la classic Degen).
The Tipn ecosystem goes deep, with rewards for active users and stakers.
Most intriguing for builders: Tipn Actions are a composable building block that developers can leverage. Cofounder @kompreni explained:
Tipn Actions augment what happens when a tip is sent. Since tips are onchain, Actions allow for arbitrary contracts to receive the funds and do interesting things with them. We've had a couple experiments with Actions:
- liking a cast, as a Tipn user, triggers a mint of a podcast
- liking a cast, as a Tipn user, funnels money into a jackpot and gives the cast creator an entry
The primary target for Actions is mini-app devs, but it's a pretty wide front of exploration.
Additional tools
- Quidli: Airdrop tokens to users who engaged with specific posts, after-the-fact ("keeping your Day 1s and diehards feeling appreciated and motivated")
- Degen Raindrops: Distribute $DEGEN to chosen users who interact with a given post, via like-to-reward mechanics
- POIDH: Run social bounties for user-generated content like memes or proof-of-completion tasks
- Ponder: Sponsor polls to get community feedback (logo choices, feature prioritization, etc.)
- DAU: Pay users to complete specific tasks within your app to drive adoption and retention
- Warpslot: Free-play "spin to win" promotions that can generate buzz around your token project
- BETRMINT: Gamified NFT or content coin promotion, through lottery mechanics, plus token distribution