How do you grow a community on Discord?

Question

Here at Stashpad, we have begun to gather a small community in our Discord. Users often report bugs and share ideas on how we can make our scratchpad better for developers.

One thing we learned recently (suggested by a user) was to create a dedicated #welcome channel within the Discord to let the #general channel focus around discussion instead of fill up with welcome messages.

What tips do you have for fostering a community within Discord and encouraging users to engage?

https://www.stashpad.com/

Erica Straub · Accepted Answer

Hi Nick! A few things I've done to grow: 1. List the server on https://discord.me/servers with a description and tags that allow people to find you 2. Promote it on socials 3. Some Reddit threads allow for Discord promotion. There's a few Reddit threads that are specifically for sharing Discord communities, although personally I think most people there are interested in sharing rather than joining. Still, doesn't hurt to share! To boost engagement I added a custom bot that gives points (the points don't matter like Who's Line is it Anyway🤣) and will give answers to yes/no questions. Dyno bot also has some fun interactive mods. I'm pretty new to running a Discord so feel free to reach out if you want to share learnings! I'm interested to see what others have to add!

Answer

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Nick Beaulieu · Answer

@richw Wow that is quite a bit of growth. I guess at that level a welcome message would be too much. It seems like having thoughtful content posted regularly and available for users would present value to any sort of maker - of course depending on the genre of the community there can be different ways to split up the content.

Bots seem to be a recurring theme, whether they are to answer simple questions or to help manage spam. Do you have any resources in mind for getting started with Discord bots?

Thank you so much for your thorough response and best of luck on your upcoming launch for Trade Hub.

Erica Straub · Answer

@beaulieun331 Ah, love to hear our Lego inspiration is translating through our product! Thanks for having a look!

Good luck with the Discord. Love the under the sea vibes Stashpad's got going!

Rich Watson · Answer

We've grown our Discord servers to 18,000 users in 11 months. For us, we don't even have a welcome channel- too many users coming in and out daily to personally welcome- I also find the pings from those bots when joining a server to be annoying. Just have a good organized server. We have a informational category and the first channel is titled START. Where it gives some info about the platform, onboarding videos to help navigate such a large server and for those new to Discord, FAQ's, rules, scam prevention, and self role assigning. We have an about chanel introducing team members. Then a app-and-bot channel going into detail about our app & Discord bot with links to the app & documentation. An upgrade-to-pro channel going over what the pekrs are of our membership, and how to subscribe. A voting/feedback channel, where we gather feedback and hold polls on upcoming features, as we a community driven app. Then a testimonial channel where members can leave a review or testimonial. We're a stock/futures/forex/crypto trading server so we have a lot of channels related to trading signals, analysis, ideas, charts, etc. These are organized by category- so one for stocks, options, & crypto. A channel strictly for market related chat, and a hangout channel where anything goes. A general help channel for trading related, and a app/bot help channel strictly for support with our app or bot. Giveaway channel- only available when giveaways are coming up or live. Voice category for live strea trading, market talk, hangout. Then we have a category for educational content, where users can't post in and we post our guides, videos, etc. Then we have channels where news RSS feeds get sent to, and voice channels for Bloomberg & CNBC radio bots stream 24/7. Our staff/admin only channels like bot logs, staff only chat, etc. It's best to have good discord bots too. Especially a good moderation bot to get rid of spam- discord has a new automod feature where you can put in words or phrases that blocks from being sent. Because scammers target our server a lot we have 'burner accounts' that just sit in the server on idle relaying DM's into a channel where our mod bot monitors and will quarantine or ban users depending on the messages sent- typically 99% of unsolicited DM's are spam/scam related. Damn this was a long read, sorry about that. Was just being thorough. You can check out our server for yourself if you'd like https://discord.gg/tradehub

Charles · Answer

You can also use this discord listing website https://discordhome.com/ Check it out you can find servers as well as advertise your own

Rich Watson · Answer

@beaulieun331 There is a lot of bots out there that you'll find do what you're looking for. you can check out https://top.gg the #1 discord bot listing sites, whos launched here on PH a month or 2 ago, and search for what you're looking to add. Can also check out github for bots to self host, theres some Zapier integrations to use as well

Nick Beaulieu · Answer

@ericamadly Love the Whose Line reference! Adding a simple but useful bot is a fantastic idea. I don't have experience creating a Discord bot but I know it has been made approachable by the development team there.

Your art at Spriteley has a nice style to it - very Lego like to me.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experience - happy to keep in touch!

Nick Beaulieu · Answer

@alexg473 I see.. calling out the benefits to existing users makes sense to me. We try to respond quickly to bug reports there, and I have chatted with several users who have had excellent suggestions in the last few weeks alone!

Thanks for sharing your idea, it will be good to reach out to existing users who probably don't know we even have a Discord. I appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.

Alex Greene · Answer

One thing we've found helpful is to promote your discord to users you already have who might not know it even exists; Share with them the benefits of joining; ie is there particular content / help you offer there but nowhere else...

How do you grow a community on Discord?

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