Creating Digital Gathering Spaces: How To Build A Discord Community

What is a Discord Community?

The Discord community is a place where the entire fanbase can come together to praise you and your content, while also connecting with other fans. It's a great way to establish friendships with your fans. Having a Discord server is crucial for anyone who creates content on multiple platforms, as it brings together all the communities you've built on YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, and TikTok. Think of the Discord community and your server as your home, where you can meet your best and most loyal fans after a long and exhausting day. Don't forget that anyone with a phone and the Discord app installed can communicate with people on a PC. 

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Why Should You Make a Community Server?

Creating a Discord community server can be beneficial for several reasons:

1. Community building: The great thing about Discord is that if your fans love your server, they will invite their friends to join, making your fanbase even larger across multiple platforms. I've had many experiences where the friends of my fans ended up getting coaching sessions (and not the fans themselves).
   
   
2. Communication: Discord offers various ways to communicate, from discord channels and voice channels to stages and private messages. This makes it easy for members to communicate with each other in real time
   
   
3. Engagement: Several activities can boost engagement in your Discord community server. You can use cool Discord bots, polls, stream announcements, and events to keep your members engaged with your new Metafy feeds, as well as other content you provide and share within your community.
   
   
4. Reach: Following engagement, your fans will share your content with their friends. This will make your brand stronger as the friends of your fans see your name popping up several times. This is also known as the Halo Effect, a cognitive bias in marketing.
   
   
5. Collaboration: Invite known figures and creators to your server, and let your members know that you have their role models in the server. Don’t forget to give them a fancy role.
   
   

Having your Discord server will make your brand more powerful. People will talk about you, and you will gain more followers. More followers will lead to more Metafy sales and views on your content creation.

Learn HERE more Discord servers, a panel that was concluded on the 14th of October, 2023.

7 Steps to Build a Community on Discord

Step 1: Create your Discord server.

Making your Discord Community server is extremely easy, and make sure to download Discord here. 

Follow the next steps:

1. Click the large “+” button on the bottom left part of the Discord UI
   
   
2. Click the “Local Community” option
   
   
3. Click “For a club or community)
   
   Then you can customize your server name and server icon.
   
   some text
   1. Suggestion: make sure that these are recognizable. Your fans need to know how to find your discord server immediately by picture and by name. For example, have the name: “Kaosx’ Community”.
      
      

You have successfully created your Discord server.

Step 2: Customize your Discord server.

Now we need to enable it. Click the name of your Discord server (located on the top left side), and click Server Settings as shown in the picture below:

You will find the prompt "Enable Community," click it and press "Get started." You will have to answer very simple questions, and then you are done! 

Recommendation: Add a server description once you have enabled the Discord Community. 

Step 3: Create unique roles and permission for your Community.

We are not done yet; we need to make sure that you have created your first Discord roles and adjusted permissions for your moderators, admins, and fans. To do that, head back to server settings, and just under the Overview, you will see "Roles." Click that. 

Now you can create new roles as well as adjust the current ones. Having Discord roles in Discord Community servers plays a huge factor. You want to highlight important people from your community, people who will assist you in helping your Discord Community server as well as those who are famous in your game, as shown in the two pictures below.

When you create a new role, there are a lot of customizations that you can make, from changing its color to giving it permission to kick/ban and mute players. Make sure that no role can @everyone or @here. This is extremely annoying and infuriating and should be left if you want to make a general announcement.

You can learn more about roles in THIS article.

Step 4: Set up your text and voice channels.

Now that you have set up all roles, we need to create channels and voice chats. The biggest mistake new Discord Communities make is that they want to have channels for every category (pet-channels, off-topic channels, clip-channels, different types of voice chats, and so on). Now you may wonder why this is bad.

There are two reasons why you should not do this:

1. Activity: Since most likely you won’t have more than 100 messages every day in the first week or two of your Discord Community server, if you separate these 100 messages into 10 channels, there will be 10 messages every day. The server will seem inactive, and therefore new people will leave upon joining your Discord Community server.
   
   
2. Confusion: The more channels there are, the more confusing the server is for newcomers. If they have to scroll through pages of channels, they will not do it.
   
   

One suggestion from experience: Most people will not read your rules or how your Discord Server functions. Keep all this information in one channel; you can use Sapphire bot to make it very clean. Check the two pictures below; the buttons are clickable as well as the menu.

Step 5: Promote your Discord server

You are all set up… the question is, how to get new people to join your server? Invite them through your other social media, Metafy. Your Discord Community server is YOU. You need to be proud of it, and the only way to get the first members is to let everyone know you have opened a server where everyone can have a direct line of communication with you.

Follow the three pictures below to share a permanent invite link to your Discord server.

Now you can share your link on your social media.

• YouTube
  
  

Put it in the description of every video. You can do it automatically (for new videos) by heading to "Settings", "Upload defaults", and "Basic info".

You put your Discord Server invites inside of the YouTube cards.

You can also pin your comment that contains the Discord server link.

• TikTok

Pin your comment that includes a permanent discord link.

• Twitch
  
  

Set up a custom command, like !discord, when your viewers ask if you have a Discord server. The bot then will respond with the response that everyone can see your permanent Discord server invite link.

You can also change your Title as well as "Go Live Notification" so it contain the command "!Discord".

Finally, do not forget to change your "About" section

• Twitter/𝕏
  
  some text
  1. Go to your profile (https://twitter.com/YOURNAME)
     
     
  2. Click "Edit profile"
     
     
  3. In the bio, add your permanent discord link
     
     

1. Other Discord servers
   
   

Step 6: Grow your Discord server.

It’s recommended that you offer something unique in your Discord Community server, just to give more initiative for other people to join. As your Discord Community servers build, you can slowly but steadily remove that initiative.

It's recommended at the start to run some voice chat activities. It can be just once a week, as long as you keep those moments special. You would be surprised on how many times my fans just randomly joined inside of the voice chat I am in, and then said how it's a pleasure that they can talk and hang out with me. This is how you build a strong relationship with your Discord Community, and show everyone that you are just like them.

Step 7: Keep it active.

Only one question remains… how to keep it active? 

That is on you; you need to be engaging with the community as much as you can. They are in your Discord Server because of you. They all share the same interests, and it is just a matter of fact where they will engage with each other. Having a Discord app will help you to be more active in your server.

When you get bigger, start doing some events, such as pub-quizzes. The picture at the start of this article was taken from a pub-quiz I have hosted. It was about a game that we played, and everyone enjoyed it. You can also host custom matches, web, or Discord games. The options are limitless.

It's essential to greet new members of your Discord server. Create a channel to warm them a welcome. If they respond, try to engage with them.

Advantages and Disadvantages of a Discord Community Server

One thing that we can add here is that you can generate revenue from your server, but that is only available in certain countries. Other advantages were already mentioned throughout the article, so let’s see the potential disadvantages.

• Dealing with trolls
  
  
• Requires extra time to create the server and keep the activity
  
  
• Limited growth option
  
  

The biggest disadvantage of having a Discord Community server is that you will have to spend your free time running it. As mentioned in the article before, having the Discord app on the phone will help you a lot. 

Discord Community & Metafy

Metafy has a vibrant community of gamers who connect around their passions through feeds, videos, articles & more. Expand your Discord Community by joining Metafy today, collaborating with other experts and the community where you can share your thoughts, expertise, and new ideas among other people.