How Crypto Companies Actually Grow on X
Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash
(Because posting “We’re excited to announce…” isn’t going to save you.)
I’ve been deep inside the X rabbit hole lately - scraping posts, running small-account comparisons, stalking what actually blows up, and what gets 3 likes and a prayer.
Let’s walk through what that actually means if you’re a CMO, founder, or marketer running a company.
What small accounts are doing that big brands aren’t
First, the raw behavior of high‑performing small accounts is pretty clear.
Visuals absolutely dominate. Roughly two‑thirds of the top tweets used an image, meme, or short video. That could be a chart, a still from a movie, a degenerate meme, whatever - but something visual that slows the scroll. Text‑only hits were the minority and were usually short and punchy.
Single‑line posts quietly run the show. Around 60%+ of the best tweets were basically one strong line and a visual. No threads. No overly structured “16 things I learned building in Web3.” In fact, threads barely showed up in the top tier at all, less than a fifth of the high performers.
The tone is the real unlock, though.
The small accounts that blew up weren’t “informative” in the corporate sense. They were relatable. Funny, a bit chaotic, and very inside‑the‑culture. Memes about missing the bottom, about selling too early, about watching your bags evaporate. Little mini‑rants about the market. Screenshots and stories that feel like something you’d drop in a group chat, not in a board deck.
They also leaned heavily into interactive hooks. Questions like “Yes or no?” or “Describe your last week in crypto” attached to an image, or simple polls framed like inside jokes. A decent chunk of the big performers were literally just clever questions with a picture.
Then you’ve got lists and tier rankings: CEX tier lists, “Solana highlights,” “what gave you your first money in Web3.” These tweet like “here’s how I see the world,” and people can’t resist arguing in the replies. That debate drives reach, which drives more followers. No mystery.
Giveaways, when they showed up, weren’t glamorous. They were simple: join this, mint that, reply to enter. FOMO + clear upside, aimed at people already living in crypto. Not the entire growth strategy, but definitely one of the levers.
Finally, storytelling and charts quietly sit under a lot of this. A few big posts were personal stories like “I made a million in my first crypto cycle,” or quick explainers with a chart and a take. But even those weren’t clean whitepapers. They were human, slightly dramatic, and aimed at keeping people reading.
If you zoom out, the pattern is straightforward: relatability + visuals + interaction beat polished education every single time.
And almost everything performs better evenings and weekends. In this slice, Friday/Saturday and that late‑afternoon‑to‑evening GMT window were especially strong. Shocking revelation: people scroll when they’re not working.
What company accounts are actually doing — and where they fall short
Now contrast that with what smaller org and company accounts are doing — media brands, DeFi projects, financial services, infra plays, all under 200k followers.
Their top tweets fall into a few clear buckets.
The strongest ones look surprisingly human: breaking‑style news about macro or policy moves, bold statements about Bitcoin or markets, and questions about where things are headed. Think, “Janet Yellen to depart… great news for Bitcoin” with an image, or “Will MicroStrategy end up holding 2% of supply?” Those posts hit hard because they mix news, opinion, and a hook in a single glance.
But once you get past the top few, you see the pattern that holds most company accounts back.
A lot of content is classic promo: “We deployed on X and Y,” “Black Friday deals up to 37% off,” “Exploring the frontier of AI & Web3.” It’s not bad, it’s just… flat. It reads like something meant for a landing page, not a social feed. It doesn’t tap into the day‑to‑day emotions of people trading, building, or coping with this market.
Questions show up, but they’re usually safe. Educational tweets exist, but they’re often tucked into videos or longer formats that require more commitment than a typical scroller wants to spend.
What’s missing is exactly what the small accounts lean on:
humor, memes, soft self‑awareness, and that group‑chat style of talking.
The data basically says: When companies act like news wires or product brochures, engagement tanks. When they act like plugged‑in humans with something at stake, engagement spikes.
What this means if you’re running a brand account
So if you’re a CMO, founder, or marketer, what do you actually do with this?
The mindset shift is simple: stop trying to sound “like a brand” and start sounding like the sharpest person in the room who happens to work at the brand.
For example, I’ve seen a stablecoin/treasury protocol go from “we post updates” to “we are a character in the RWA/stablecoin story.” The difference wasn’t a rebrand or a 50‑slide strategy deck. It was leaning into the same patterns the small accounts use — just with more taste.
Instead of stiff, over‑produced creatives, they move toward meme‑adjacent content: screenshots with a caption, simple two‑color charts, reaction images that poke fun at market moves, and gentle jokes about yields, collateral, and treasuries. Nothing cringe, nothing that makes compliance faint — just acknowledging how this stuff actually feels for users.
They tell stories around their key concepts: “your assets working while you sleep,” “treasury teams quietly becoming yield maxis,” “watching T‑bill yields do more for you than your salary.” They stay in the world their users live in, not the corporate world their decks live in.
On the more “serious” side, they flip their updates into list‑style posts, not long threads. Instead of a 12‑tweet explainer on product changes, it becomes something like: “what changed for you this week,” broken down in one visual and a short caption. You can imagine a brand talking about “top assets used as collateral this week,” “three things we’re seeing in RWA flows,” or “what we learned after crossing a new supply milestone” — and doing that with a graphic you can understand in half a second.
Occasional giveaways or quests become accelerants, not a crutch. Rather than endless “airdrop when,” they run simple “reply and win” moments tied to actual usage or feedback. That attracts people who at least care enough to interact, not just airdrop farmers on autopilot.
Founders and key team members step in as characters. Once in a while, the founder posts from the company handle or quote‑tweets with a story: why they built the thing, what they got wrong on the way to $400M in supply, how they think about the next cycle. Not polished keynote quotes — vulnerable, specific, slightly messy. That’s the stuff people remember.
And over all of that, charts and simple data snapshots become the backbone of “serious” content. In a world where everyone is posting words, the account that posts one clean chart with one strong line of context feels ten times more credible. “Here’s what our users did this week.” “Here’s how yields moved vs. the market.” “Here’s where onchain treasuries sit now vs. six months ago.” No fluff.
The NFT / Solana / degen corner of X
If your company lives closer to Solana, NFTs, or the more degen side of the spectrum, the bar is even higher, and the path is even clearer.
The NFT and Solana accounts that do well blend irreverent humor with very real signals. They’ll roast floor prices, joke about flipping at the top, meme “your PFP watching you buy another one,” and then pivot into actual onchain action. The world is chaotic, fun, and extremely online and the content mirrors that.
A company competing in that space can’t show up sounding like a bank in 2012. The play is to meet that culture where it is: share a screenshot, share a chart of onchain activity, drop a meme about people farming points or obsessing over yields, and then gently tie it back to what you offer. Not with a hard CTA, just with, “btw, this is why we built X.”
It’s the same pattern over and over again:
start with emotion, layer in context, earn the right to be informative.
Timing, rhythm, and how to think about output
One last piece that matters more than most teams admit: rhythm.
Looking at the patterns, evenings and weekends — especially Friday and Saturday in that 4–9 PM GMT window — consistently show up in the big performers. That doesn’t mean you never post at other times. It just means your “swing for the fences” tweets shouldn’t go out at 10:15 AM on a random Tuesday because it fits the internal meeting schedule.
The other rhythm piece is how you balance your content types.
If all you ever post is hardcore education, you’ll be respected but muted.
If all you ever post is memes, you’ll be entertaining but not trusted with real money.
The accounts that grow and convert tend to settle into an unspoken pattern: most of their posts are high‑engagement formats — memes, lists, questions, quick visuals — and then a solid minority are news, charts, and simple educational breakdowns. Education is there, but it’s not the opening act; it’s the thing you appreciate once you already like the account.
From a practical standpoint, that might look like this: on any given day, you’re aiming for one tweet that’s just pure engagement (a question or meme), one tweet that’s data or news (a chart or update), and maybe one tweet that teaches something simple in a very visual, digestible way.
The real shift CMOs and founders have to make
If you strip all the numbers and examples away, the core lesson is simple:
Most brands still treat X like a press page. The accounts that win treat it like a live conversation with the smartest, most online part of their market.
You don’t need a bigger budget. You don’t need fancier graphics.
You need to be more honest, more visual, and a little more fun.
Talk like a person. Tell your story. Let people argue with you.
The growth follows.
