Today the beta of Deegram has been live for 1 week, it's been a busy yet very rewarding week for us in the team, and we have been able to clear the most pressing issues. We are preparing a recruitment campaign for Deegram that will go live this week. These kinds of campaigns are both fun and challenging. It's all about achieving the best possible balance between cost and user acquisition. We expect to have to iterate a lot on our growth strategies, but steps are being taken and we'll keep you all informed about our progress.

• Onboarded users to Steem: 26
  This week we created accounts for and onboarded 26 new users to Steem, on track with our beta test period KPI to onboard 50 new people to Steem per month on average.

• Posts authored: 37
• App downloads: 101
• Downloads on iOS: 27
• Downloads on Android: 74
  

Solving retention for onboarded users - a call for curation and interaction

Onboarding new users and creating Steem accounts is all well and nice, however, the value these accounts bring is very limited unless we can retain the users and keep them engaged. First and foremost, the social interaction and connection with other users are what social networks are all about, and then the value of Steem, owning and being rewarded for your original content.

Several users, especially one, have been active in voting and curating the 'deegram' tag here on Steem, and we are very grateful for this. Being able to boost some post payouts from the low ranges of $0.02-0.03 to $0.15 and up when they provide quality content is extremely valuable.

We pay the account creation fee and delegate Steem Power to smoothen the onboarding of new users, and we want to bring Steem out to new people. However, the cost of doing this is not very sustainable long term unless we keep the users around and incentivized. To keep them engaged and to build a strong community we need your help to curate and interact with the content they contribute with.

Connection and social interaction

The network effects in place in social networks keep us in place, we stay with our current platform because that's where our network is. Our need to interact with others is universal, a necessity for giving sense and meaning to the world around us. A like, share or comment gives us social validation, they are symbolic and makes us feel good.

Introduction tags are littered with shameless self-promotion and app promotion programs, as well as presenting new users with an overload of information about percentile upvotes, curation trails and delegations. Most of the information is meant with good intentions, but this is a problem when users eagerly see they got 9 new comments, only to realize not a single one of them is human, or worst case just confusing.
Most people have no knowledge of how Steem works or even what blockchain or cryptocurrency is, and loading all this information on them at once may chase them away in confusion. Sure, any dapp/client can blacklist accounts, but this does not really solve the underlying problem.

Many of our new users report that they don't feel any connection a community, that it feels empty. The interactions are lacking, and we are trying to make that change. We kindly ask you, the Steem community, to help us find, interact with and curate quality content on the Deegram tag.

It does not necessarily have to be an upvote, just a few comments can help make a big difference.

We will continue to work on our onboarding, and we hope that all of us together can help them feel welcome here in the Steem ecosystem.

Best regards,
The Deegram team

Join Deegram

Head over to Google Play or Apple Testflight to get the Deegram app today, or head over to the website.