If you’re not familiar with Discord, you’re missing out on one of the most popular text, chat, and voice platform communities in the world, with over 130 million registered users. While there are other text, chat, and voice platforms like Slack (which is geared towards companies and businesses) or WhatsApp (which lets you connect with friends worldwide), Discord combines these capabilities into one platform.
Discord began in gaming, but that’s not the only type of community you can build! Almost any kind of business, influencer, brand, or person who has hobbies can create a growing community on Discord. With Discord moving away from its focus on gaming, the platform has grown into something much broader in scope. Resulting in accelerated growth in registered users to one of the top choices to build an online community. The best part? Discord is free with applications for both your desktop and phone.
You probably already know how fantastic the platform is for building an online community, so let’s jump right into the good stuff. We’ll talk through the steps you must take to build your online community on Discord in 2021, the right way.
Find Your Niche
It sounds so cliché, but you must figure out what you want your community to be known for and how it will be different than what’s already on Discord. You can’t just copy and paste someone else’s already established community and think you’ll have the same results.
First, what is the purpose of your discord server? Are you a gamer, influencer, or brand? Are you just someone who has an intense love for anime, coffee, memes? Whatever it is, figure out what you’re going to offer to your community. If you don’t have any ideas, check out the top trending server tags like anime, meme, music, crypto, overwatch, fortnight, giveaway, kpop, animal crossing, social and fun to see how your community will fit in.
You can also check out other popular platforms to see what they’re doing right and brainstorm some of your own ideas. Here are a few top trending servers that have created an amazing community for their users:
- Chillzone: Chillzone has over 14 million messages on its server and 24/7 interaction and conversation. It doesn’t revolve around a single topic. Chillzone just encourages discussion in a “chill” environment.
- Jets Dream World: Jets Dream World has over 500 custom Peepo and Pepe Emotes. They talk about anime, among us, and have over 1,000 dollars in Nitro giveaways.
- Taco Shack: Taco shack is all about tacos. You can even run your own taco franchise! You can hire employees, buy upgrades, and you can even enter giveaways. It’s a unique way to create fun for their community.
Create Your Discord Server
Now that you have a million-dollar idea for your server, it’s time to create it. First, you need to download Discord on your computer and open the Discord interface. Create a free account by filling in your information, and it will prompt you to either create or join a server. With Discord, you can create public and private servers with no limit. Follow the prompts to create a server, and you’ll be automatically connected to your server once you’ve finished registration.
You can now invite your friends, create channels and change any settings, like assigning moderator permission to other users. It’s a good idea to start by creating general channels. Good ones to start with might include Welcome, Rules, Introduction, Announcements, General Chat, or any other relevant channels to your niche. You can even create private channels where just those with specific roles or only top community members can join. As you can see, you have so much flexibility in how you use Discord.
Get Your First 100
Once you have all of your settings and channels complete, you need people! If you’re not gaining popularity, there’s no point in the server. Start by trying to invite all your friends and fans, if you have any. Post about your server to any of your gaming feeds, social media, or any other network where you already have a community. You have to keep pushing and posting to convert friends to users on your server.
You can use unique tactics like offering rewards, giveaways, exclusive freebies, or choose to announce significant updates at a particular time of the week. You want people to be interested and offer them something of value to entice more users to join your server.
Push Community Events
Even if you’ve reached your first users, your channel is going to feel empty and sad. Creating a Discord community is not an easy task. You can’t just leave it alone and expect your community to grow. It would help if you made an effort to inspire users to keep interacting with your feed. Here are some easy ways to keep building your community.
Push Discussion – Posting daily topics or encouraging conversation will help establish your community’s feel. It might feel weird to have to do this, but many platforms need to create questions and interaction to get their community started. Eventually, your community will grow to the point where you don’t have to post topics because natural interaction will occur.
Create Community Events – Excitement is everything! If your users are excited to be there, they’re going to stay and keep interacting with your server. You can do things like create giveaways, make a competition or challenge, release exclusive content on certain days to your users, etc.
Don’t Lie – It’s important to note that Discord users want value, so don’t promise them a giveaway or special reward if you’re not going to follow through. That’s the easiest way for users to leave and discourage others from joining your server. It’s not worth it. You don’t want to end up being in one of these videos.
- Stick to Your Rules – Your job is to remove anyone who doesn’t vibe with the community. If you notice a troublemaker, instead of calling them out and creating a problem, don’t allow them to keep interacting with your community. Keep it appropriate and keep the drama off your server.
You can check out our other blog on how to grow your online community from zero to a thousand here.
Stay Consistent
Even if your community isn’t growing and thriving just yet, stay consistent. Your community will not be an overnight success. You need to keep working at it. If you post daily, continue to post daily. If you started weekly giveaways, keep doing weekly giveaways. Users will come to expect certain things from your channel, so it’s essential to stay consistent from the start. By doing so, you will encourage your community to grow.
