How many people are interested in Cardano on social media?

Cardano will be successful if people use it. For that to happen, they need to know it exists and that they have the option. Brand awareness and the emotions associated with it are an important part of adoption. The cryptocurrency industry is big. There are literally hundreds of other brands besides Bitcoin and Ethereum that everyone has heard of at least once. LunarCrush is tracking social engagement in the cryptocurrency industry and we can see how the Cardano brand fares against other projects.

TLDR

Interest in Cardano has increased significantly since 2019. It is now growing very slowly in a bear market and is starting to slowly grow in the last few months probably due to DeFi summer.

What is the purpose of measuring social engagement?

The goal of measuring social engagement is to see how many people mention a given blockchain project over time. It is then possible to measure how many and how the surrounding community (followers) react to these mentions. By analyzing the reactions, sentiment can be measured. Based on all the data collected, it is possible to create a ranking and track which project is being talked about less or more in a given time. Based on historical data, a long-term trend can be tracked.

LunarCrush collects data from social networks, specifically Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Medium, and hundreds of other sites. It collects over 1 million mentions and over 2 billion engagements every day. Let's look at the specific data being collected and describe their meaning.

Social volume is tracked for blockchain projects. This is an indication of the number of mentions at a given time. Social engagement (likes, sharings, responses, etc.) measures the depth of community interaction across social posts. If you posted, "I just bought some $ADA today." and it was retweeted and liked hundreds of times, social engagement captures the virality of a post. That helps to understand the velocity of social interaction.

Social contributors are a tally of how many unique people are talking about a blockchain project at any given time. If you posted 10 messages a day, you would be counted as 1 social contributor.

Social dominance calculates the "share of voice" across all social media data. Think of it as a market cap for social media mentions. If there are 1 million mentions of Bitcoin across social media for a day and 2 million mentions total for the entire cryptocurrency market, that would mean Bitcoin's social dominance is 50%.

Social engagement of Cardano and other projects

Let's look at the overall results of the first 10 projects ranked by social dominance.

At the time of writing, Cardano is in 6th place with a dominance of 2.17%. This is a very good result in the context of other projects. Bitcoin's social dominance is relatively low, only 6.6%. I expected Bitcoin's dominance to be at least one-third. Ethereum's social dominance is 4.5% and Solana's is 3.1%. In social dominance, Cardano is only 3x smaller than Bitcoin and 2x smaller than Ethereum. When you consider that Cardano is a relatively young project, this is an achievement.

Let's take a look at the long-term trend since 2019. You can see that there was relatively little talk about Cardano from 2019 until early 2021. Social dominance was around 1%, but the number of social mentions was low (2K) as was social engagement (1-10M).

In 2021, more people began talking about Cardano. Social dominance was around 2-3%, mentions were around 20K and social engagement was around 20M-30M. This is approximately a tenfold increase.

The years 2022 and 2023 will be a bear market. Still, Cardano is slightly growing in statistics. In 2022, social dominance is around 2-3%. Social mentions and engagement are similar to 2021. The number of social mentions more often gets to 30-40K. Social engagement occasionally exceeds 100M.

The last 2 months have been very good for Cardano as social engagement has reached 386M and dominance is up to 3.88%. Apparently, this is related to the arrival of DeFi summer and the SEC lawsuits against Binance and Coinbase.

Cryptocurrencies were most talked about during the bull runs. The last one was in 2021. Cardano has maintained good social engagement since then.

Let's take a look at Bitcoin now.

Of particular note is the long-term decline in social dominance, which was around 40-50% in 2019-2020. In 2021, it began to decline and is currently at a historic low of around 5-10%. The number of mentions is roughly around 200-300K and social engagement has around 2B over the last year. Only about 6 times more people talk about Bitcoin than Cardano. That's not a significant difference. But the social engagement of Bitcoin is huge.

Ethereum maintains a long-term social dominance of around 10%. Similar to Bitcoin, it has fallen to an all-time low in recent months at 3-5%. O Ethereum has maintained social mentions of around 250K and social engagement of around 500K to 1B in the last year.

Interestingly, about the same number of people are talking about Bitcoin and Ethereum, and social engagement is not dramatically different. While Bitcoin is doing slightly better, it doesn't have a substantial edge over Ethereum.

There are not even 20 projects that have a social dominance higher than 1%. Many relatively well-known projects such as Litecoin, Tether, Algorand, Optimism, Polkadot, Cosmos, Monero, and Tron have a social dominance of less than 1%. It can be relatively difficult (and expensive) for projects to get more media visibility and get people interested in them.

The Cardano community is large and engaged, which certainly helps the project. Cardano ambassadors play an important role.

Wider context to the results

Cardano is a young project, so no one expects it to be talked about more than Bitcoin, which people have known for more than twice as long. Ethereum has a head start on Cardano by about 2 years.

Staking on Cardano started in 2020. The first smart contracts could have been deployed around the end of 2021. DeFi summer on Cardano came recently, in mid-2023. Ethereum is being talked about a lot because of the apps. When you talk about, for example, Uniswap, which is at number 7 in social dominance, you're also kind of talking about Ethereum.

Many people are mainly interested in the market value of cryptocurrencies and charts. These topics are very likely to generate a lot of social engagement but are not necessarily that important for adoption.

How people talk about projects is also important. It's not just the amount of social engagement that's important, it's the sentiment. There are a lot of hacks happening on Ethereum that are attracting media attention. The Bitcoin community is toxic. A large number of comments about Bitcoin are negative. A large part of the social interaction is the competition between members of different blockchain communities. It is not about communication towards newcomers but about biased opinions or even insults. Social networks prefer to display controversial messages over negative ones, which also affects results. Many articles are sponsored by big media owners who prefer some projects over others. There are generally both positive and negative messages on social media, and people respond to all of them.

You can find a lot of negative articles and FUD about Cardano. On the other hand, there is a lot of positive content. The overall sentiment is the result of all the messages and posts. People's reactions also play an important role.

Social engagement doesn't say anything about what people will end up thinking about projects and what emotions they will have when they hear about a brand. Cardano is the highest-ranking crypto brand in the Top Brand Intimacy 2022 report. We can assume that people associate Cardano with pleasant emotions and have a positive relationship with the brand.

Conclusion

When you think about the results in a broader context, you find that the majority of the population is not interested in cryptocurrencies at all (although they may speculatively hold them).

The important thing is the long-term trend. Interest in Cardano is growing and that's good. The next bull market will be important for the project as it will be the third in a row that Cardano exists. It is more than certain that it will do better than the last one when there was no DeFi on Cardano. In the next one, people will not only talk about Cardano, but also about the apps, and thus interest in ADA and staking will grow.

Bitcoin's dominance is likely to continue to decline, not only in market capitalization but also in social engagement. These things are related. If Cardano gets to 5-10% in social dominance, it will be a success.