Anyone can set up a Discord community within seconds; however, growing a Discord community to reach thousands of members, as well as keeping these members engaged, can’t be achieved by luck.

Discord was originally built to create a social community for gamers; with its live streaming feature, gamers can automatically broadcast content from their mobile or desktop screen, allowing spectators to watch live competitions over the internet. However, since 2020, particularly since the COVID pandemic, the app has branched out to other niches that require community engagement, including music, content creation, and most recently, cryptocurrency and NFTs.

Since then, Discord has been growing steadily; as of 2021, Discord averaged 140 million monthly users, about 270% higher than its figure in 2019 (56 million).

Why Use Discord?

Discord is arguably the best community interaction app that exists. Each Discord community is called a server, which could have different channels.

For example, an NFT Discord server could have separate channels for voice interaction, announcements, link sharing, meme contests, etc. Within a single server, they could even have separate channels for English speakers, French, Portuguese, and other sub-communities. Hence, a single discord community can have a series of active communication and concurrent interaction across several channels without making the server clumsy, allowing users to lose track of vital information.

Discord also allows server owners to create membership roles with color codes. For example, in a discord community, color code wine could indicate moderators, red for premium members, orange for standard members, and yellow for basic members. Hence, in that server, there could be channels that basic or standard members cannot access.

Discord has a lot more features, but these top the lot, and the best of all is that Discord channels are free to create and join; however, members can’t simply search for a channel to join; they must get an invite.

Growing A Discord Community

So, you have created your Discord community, and you want to grow your audience; unlike Facebook groups or Telegram channels where users can simply use the search bar to find groups they’d love to join, Discord is strictly by invites; so growing your community from 1 person to a thousand people is all your responsibility; and if you want to ensure that your server is filled with members who are optimal for your content, you would have to put in some work. Below are some tips for growing your discord community.

Ensure That You Offer Value

The most important factor for an active social media community is “value.” As long as members get valuable information from your community, it will self-promote; people will beg to join, and you will get easy word-of-mouth marketing. For example, if you own a fitness community, and your methods help people burn several pounds with home routines and no gym registration, your members will be quick to share the quick word on social media, and you will get more invite requests.

Creating a Value Funnel

• Offer Free Value: In the value funnel, it is important to start by offering free value. For example, if you intend to open an exclusive community on fitness in Discord, you need to become an authority on other expansive social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook – We can call them “Landing platforms” as they assist in onboarding prospects to your Discord server. Ensure that you amass followers on these landing platforms and offer them fitness tips they would otherwise pay to learn elsewhere. Be consistent with it, and as you grow on these platforms, promote your Discord server. This way, you can be sure that your server will be dominated by people interested in your content and not just anybody.
• Promote Yourself: It may be tricky to promote your discord group directly; it is often better to promote your landing grounds on other social media apps like Instagram or Facebook. You could use Instagram/Facebook ads to direct ad traffic to your account, from where prospects will be redirected to your Discord Server.
• Ensure you are on the right platforms: If your content requires a lot of visuals, Instagram and TikTok are optimal; for example, a fitness instructor requires a lot of video content, so Instagram and TikTok are good choices where Videos auto-play. On the other hand, a dietician or nutritionist doesn’t require as much visual content; a few times, they may share pictures, but most of the time, they offer value in text format, so Facebook or Twitter is a better choice.
• Utilize FOMO: One important strategy for building an exclusive Discord community is to create the “fear of missing out” (FOMO). It is a psychological tool that helps to appeal to the emotions of your prospects.

Observe the FOMO buzz phrase below,

“Join our community of Urban Body Builders to get better tips and interact with fellow fitness experts; the server will become restricted after the first 2,000 members.”

By reading this, a prospect who has gained some value from your Instagram or Twitter page will be somewhat compelled to join. Within them, they believe “this is an opportunity, and I must not miss it.” So they hurriedly try to join to jump on the moving train before it gets too late.

By doing all these, you will organically grow your audience; it takes time, so be patient and trust the process. Although hitting the first thousand members is often the hardest part, it becomes easier from there.

The work isn’t done after creating a working funnel; in fact, it has only begun. Once you have a working back channel that diverts needed traffic to your Discord server, you need to put more effort into maintaining the existing members. At this point, getting new members is as important as retaining the existing ones, so you must offer even greater value to the members already on the server. Here are some tips below:

Offer Exclusive Value

Your Discord server is an exclusive community, unlike Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok, where anybody can visit your page and leave. The people who have joined your Discord server are expecting to get even more value than what they got for free from the “landing” platforms. Hence, it is important that you offer value that they won’t get elsewhere.

You could set up a live video or audio streaming session for community members to ask questions and communicate with you in real-time. You could share eBooks and other files that may be impossible to post on Twitter and Facebook timelines. Again, the goal is to offer better value than what they got on the landing platforms.

Reward Your Community

Perhaps one strategy that can never be outdated is “giving.” Perhaps, givers never lack. Strategically rewarding your community with freebies will help facilitate growth and maintain existing members. Below are some ways to reward your community.

• Giveaways: If you have a crypto or NFT community on Discord, you may reward them with giveaways while tasking them with promotional responsibilities. For example, the giveaway could involve promotional tasks such as retweeting a post on Twitter, liking a post on Instagram, or creating fresh posts with the aim of promoting your community. To do this easily, you could use the Cwallet Giveaway tool that automates your giveaway; it automatically verifies task completion, ensuring that the giveaway is fair and no one cheats. After the deadline, you can manually handpick the winners and share rewards with them, or you may choose to automate it. Either way, you get some promotion for your community, and in return, you reward them with a few tokens. Read more about the Cwallet Giveaway tool here
• Tips & Airdrops: You can also reward your community via Tips. Whether you own a crypto community, a gaming community, fitness and health, or whatever community you own, you can tip outstanding members with rewards to encourage active participation in the community; for example, you could organize polls to vote for the member with the best contribution in the community for a select period (say a month). After a winner is selected, you could easily tip them with crypto tokens such as Bitcoin or USDT, which is equivalent to the U.S. Dollar’s value if you don’t want volatile assets. See how it works.

Also, you could organize airdrops to randomize the reward sharing process to allow any member benefit or make it more specific such that some in-app action is required. Click here to see how it works.

• Referral Contests: You could also set up referral contests with the aid of the Cwallet bot; this allows you to invite a valuable audience into your channel. The referral contest may last for two weeks, a month, or any duration you deem appropriate. During this period, the invited members would be vetted by the Cwallet bot; if they leave, it means they aren’t interested in the channel, and the inviter will not get reward points for such members. Similarly, if they stay and do not interact, the Cwallet bot will recognize such members as bots, and there will be no reward points for such. Hence, the members will be incentivized to add only target audience members to the community; thereby facilitating growth and getting rewarded; win-win. See how to set up a referral program on your Discord server via Cwallet.

N.B.: Your members don’t need to pre-open a Cwallet account to receive their tips/airdrops or referral rewards; at any time of their choice, they can create a Cwallet account with their Discord username and access them.

Monetize Your Value

This doesn’t necessarily have to be the last step in your community development endeavor; ideally, it should come somewhere in between. However, it shouldn’t come too early when your members are not fully convinced. It is important to ensure that they are hooked to the content and won’t mind paying for continued access; then, you may monetize it.

The Cwallet Bot allows you to set up a subscription bot that will require intending members to make payments before getting access to the server. In addition, you could set up different subscription types; you could have regular subscribers at $5 monthly or VIP subscribers at $20 monthly, with varying access levels.

See details about setting up a subscription on Discord via the Cwallet Bot.

How To Get The Cwallet Bot on Discord

To use the Cwallet Bot in your Discord server, you need to create an exclusive bot and invite it to your channel. This can be specially configured for your specific needs; see details here.

Final Takeaway

As said earlier, very few apps can go toe-to-toe against Discord in building and managing an exclusive community. Hence, if you are a content creator, own a gaming community, or own a crypto/NFT community, Discord is an excellent way of keeping them engaged while growing your community and making a profit.

Since Discord’s open-source nature allows customizable bots to assist in community management, you can use this to your advantage, set up automatic management, organize giveaways, and even set up a fee-based subscription. There is no limit to how you can maximize your Discord community using the Cwallet BOT.