Discord has a lower profile than many of its competitors such as Slack. But it is a valuable social media marketing channel for many businesses – especially gaming and eSport brands.
It's free to use and unlike many other social channels, it does not run ads. The way the platform runs makes it perfect for growing and nurturing communities. The communication options and ability to converse in large groups make it a great platform for building your brand's community.
If you want to learn how to set up a Discord community, you can check out our Quick 7-Step Guide.
Like most social media platforms, Discord communities need oversight and input from your brand. You don't have to craft high-quality videos or get a design budget set up, but posts and comments from your brand can start conversations, attract responses, and keep the communication flowing.
In this post, we will walk you through some simple tactics you can implement to help you nurture your Discord community and ensure that you have active and valuable members.
A key component of any strong community is the members of that community. You want to find the right people to join your Discord community. These should be ‘high-intent’ members who will add value to the community by helping it grow, engaging with other members and contributing to conversations.
You can invite members to your Discord community through links. You can use a Discord bot to track how members are joining your server and look for where the best and worst members are coming from.
You may then decide to remove your invite link from sources that are attracting users who:
On the other hand, you may have a link that you further want to promote because it is attracting users who:
A great first step when building a thriving discord community is to enable the Welcome Screen. Your Welcome Screen will help guide new users on the conduct of your server, its purpose, and the layout.
You can use your Welcome Screen to direct new users to the most important channels on your server and encourage them to start posting on the server by including a call to action such as “introduce yourself here.”
You can explain how to navigate your server and describe any special features you’ve implemented through Discord bots. You should also use easy-to-understand role and channel names so users can quickly jump into your server.
An obvious, although sometimes difficult, method of increasing engagement and nurturing your Discord community is to make sure there is regular communication happening on your server.
Turning users into communicators can be as simple as creating channels where your users can talk about the topic of your server in general conversation, ask other users for help or advice, and engage in other meaningful discussions.
For example, if you have a gaming brand and create a server for one of your games, you can create a channel for game updates.
Often to encourage communication you need to be present on your server. You can start the conversation by asking questions and keep it going by responding to the user's answers. In the beginning, conversations will need to encourage more on your end. However, over time, you will find they flow more naturally and come from your community contributors.
Discord servers are a great platform for growing your brand's community. But to use Discord successfully you have to nurture that community. You need to ensure you have a Welcome Screen set up that is easy for new users to understand, encourage communication and recruit high-value users to your server.
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