Do you want to build a community on a digital platform for your brand where you can connect with your customers and followers?
Discord is one of the free platforms for building a community and growing a brand. So, the community platform provides space for the clients and supporters to come together and engage in groups. It involves bringing people together to build a community of dedicated members on the Discord platform.
Did you know that Discord is already powering over 200 million monthly active users? Your brand can use this platform to create a highly positive ecosystem, drive membership through growth, and result in super-loyal brand advocates.
In this blog, we'll guide you on how to build a Discord community and provide some other valuable information to build your community. You'll learn about community building, setting up your brand, and many other helpful tips!
What is a Discord Community?
Discord communities are virtual hangout spots where people gather to connect and engage around common interests, like gaming, hobbies, or brands. It's a space where members chat via text, voice, or video in ways that make conversations feel more personal and interactive than on other social platforms.
Imagine walking into an educational event or party filled with people with initially common passions. Well, that is the core of the Discord community! It allows fans to connect with your brand and also create meaningful relationships. Some communities are public, and others will be private, depending on your needs. They are active centers for collaborating, creating, and friendship, which makes it easier for the brands to interact with their viewers.
Is Discord the Right Choice for Building Your Brand's Community?
Before creating a Discord community, you should figure out whether this platform aligns with your brand's goal is essential. Let's break down some main points before you make the decision.
Is Discord Right for Your Niche?
If a B2C brand wants to connect with its audience in a fun and interactive way, Discord can be a good choice for them. Although it started as a platform for gamers, it now supports various interests. While there might be better options for attracting new B2B clients, it's great for building partnerships.
Who Is Your Audience?
Discord has grown beyond just gamers. If your audience likes real-time conversations and is tech-savvy, they'll feel right at home. Consider whether your audience would enjoy asking questions, sharing ideas, and interacting directly with your brand and other members.
What Stage of the Customer Journey Are You Targeting?
Discord works best for customers who already know your brand and want a deeper connection. It's great for creating loyal fans but only sometimes reaches brand-new customers. If you're aiming to turn casual customers into passionate supporters, Discord is a good tool.
Do You Have the Resources to Manage a Community?
Running a Discord community requires time and effort. You'll need a team to manage and keep the community active. Plus, you have to take the hustle of moderating to engage with members.
Is Your Audience Ready?
Discord is a platform built for real-time conversations. This could be the place if your community loves talking to, asking questions, or sharing ideas with others. This community platform provides a home for real-time discussion, which gives more involvement and personalization that your community will love on Discord.
Why Building a Discord Community is Good for Your Brand?
Today's customers want more than just a product. They want a human connection with the brands they support. That is where Discord comes in to help. It provides a perfect opportunity to build a tight-knit community around your brand where authentic relationships can be fostered along with ongoing engagement.
You can throw it here for a better understanding - How Do You Build A Community From Scratch: Tips And Tricks.
Let’s break down a few points on why starting a Discord community may prove great for your brand:
Building Trust and Loyalty
By inviting customers to your community, they are made to feel that they matter. When their voice has been heard, and they feel important--they are more apt to stay around for longer periods.
Offer Quick Help
Discord lets you quickly address customer questions and concerns. That means it leaves room to show that customer satisfaction is the main priority of your brand and that you are ready to help.
Engage and Interact
Build an Energetic community by hosting events, Q&A sessions, and sharing the latest updates. The more you engage, the stronger the connection!
Build a Unique Environment
You are offering your community something special. Perhaps early access to products or "inside" direct calls with your team members. That binds and engages your audience.
Show Off Your Brand: Identity Package
With a Discord community, you can let your brand's personality evolve. The words you use to talk to and deal with members of your audience will also emphasize and bring out their values, separating them from ordinary people.
Discord community is about connecting with your audience. It's about values at the heart of your brand and the welfare of clients coming first. Building a Discord Community can help you reach these goals while ingraining long-term worth with your customers and reflecting it for small companies and big brands like conglomerates encompassing many subsidiary organizations.
Now that we've explored why Discord can be a great platform for building your brand's community. It's time to get into the details of how to build a community on Discord. Here are ten easy steps to create an engaging and thriving Discord community for your brand.
How to Build A Discord Community For Your Brand: 10 Easy Steps
Here are ten easy ways to build an amazing community for your brand on Discord. These will help you build your community from scratch by showing you exactly how to make your space inviting to your audience. Following these steps, you’ll discover how to building a Discord community that keeps your followers connected, engaged, and excited about your offer.
Step 1: Defining Your Purpose and Goals For Your Brand’s Community
Before building your Discord community for your brand, it's important to note that hard work, patience, and a properly thought-out plan go into achieving great results. Now, the things to do before creating your Discord server are to have a clear idea of why you want to build a brand community and what you want to achieve with it.
Do you want to build your community? Do you want to increase awareness, loyalty, feedback, or advocacy for your brand? Do you want to provide educational, entertaining, or supportive content for your community? Do you want to create a sense of belonging, trust, or fun for your community? Having a specific purpose and goals will help you design your server, invite your audience, and measure your success.
Having a purpose helps create a community that people will strive to be part of; a clear purpose makes your community a place where people want to join and helps you focus on getting the right members involved.
Step 2: Building a Discord Community By Setting Up Your Server
Let’s now learn how to build a community in Discord and set up your server. Discord gives you the tools to design your server and channels to match your brand's style and meet your community's needs. You can define unique brand attributes such as name, logo, colors, and description. You may organize your server using categories and channels based on different topics or activities.
This may include channels for making announcements, FAQs, collecting feedback, sharing resources, hosting events, or casual chats. In addition, this bot and its integrations can perform operations and maintenance on their behalf, providing them with a wonderful experience.
It's also important to ensure your server and channels are easy to use and relevant to your members. Keep everything aligned with your brand's personality and values to create a great community space.
Here's a simple way to start:
Setting up a Discord server is easier. After choosing the template, Discord will ask if your server is for a club, community, or private group. It doesn't make a difference either way, so you can choose a community for simplicity or skip it entirely.
Fun stuff: let's name your server and choose an icon. Your server's name should reflect your business, and the icon should be consistent with your branding—think of your logo or other brand elements.
Congratulations! Your server is now open and running in the Discord community. The very next step is to create channels. Those are little chat rooms for specific topics; you will find them on the left side of your server.
Text channels are perfect for sharing messages, images, and links, while voice channels are for real-time conversations via voice or video. When setting up your channels, keep your community's goals in mind. If you're building a customer community, create channels around fun, everyday discussions like favorite TV shows or hobbies. If you plan to share updates about your brand, give those announcements a dedicated space.
Take a page from Unwinnable, a pop culture criticism site. It organizes its channels using different entertainment media like TV and gaming. You can do the same based on the topics your community cares about.
Finally, consider making it a community server, depending on what you want from your server.
Step 3: Create organized channels
In such cases, organizing your channels well will also be very user-friendly for your Discord server. Members would know exactly where to go, which makes for a smoother operation.
Set up your channels as follows:
General Discussion: A place for conversations of a casual nature.
Support: A channel where questions are asked or answers are received.
Feedback: A venue to share opinions or comments about your product or service.
Announcement: For expressions of important data, news, or event information.
Or add fun channels like #memes or #fan-art to keep it light. The organization makes it easier for everyone to find what they want and keeps it fun and festive!
Step 04: Setting Up Server Rules
Setting clear rules from the beginning of a Discord community is important so things stay friendly and structured. A space usually becomes unmanageable without rules, and you cannot keep it welcoming.
Here are some basic rules to consider:
Respecting all: Give respect to every member because they need to feel more secure and respected to maintain interest in your brand.
No spam or self-promotion: Avoid letting people post too much unnecessary stuff or promote themselves in ways that distract from the conversation.
Stick to the topic: Make sure people discuss the right things in the right channels to keep everything neat and easy to follow.
To ensure everyone knows the rules, create a special channel just for them or pin the rules in your welcome channel so new members see them immediately. You can even ask new users to agree to the rules before they can start chatting.
Good rules help everyone understand how to behave and keep the community fun.
Step: 05 Keeping Your Discord Community Engaged and Active
Once your Discord server is set up, the goal is to keep it active and fun. Here's how you can make sure people stick around and enjoy the space:
Create fun events: game night, movie watch parties, or Q&A events since there could be a question-and-answer segment for guests where certain people can get answers from someone knowledgeable about the subject. Events give people a reason to participate in bringing them together.
Create interest channels: Set up channels for different hobbies or topics your community cares about. This helps people find others with similar interests, making conversations more natural and fun.
Run themed challenges: Try hosting themed challenges like a photo contest, meme competition, or art challenge. These can be weekly or monthly, and members can submit their entries for everyone to enjoy (and vote on!).
Use bots for fun: Add bots that make things more interactive, like ones that run trivia games or allow custom emojis. Bots can keep things lively and make conversations flow more easily.
Having events and cool channels and adding fun features will attract people to your server. Your server will be where people want to hang out, have fun, and stay engaged!
Step 6: Form a Management Team for the Discord Server Community
Day by Day, your Discord community will increase. These will be the moments you need to think about creating a strong management team to manage your audience, customers, and followers.
Active moderators you trust and who get the vibe you're going for with your community will keep things respectful and open to anyone. Clearly state the mods' duties:
How to handle disagreements.
How to engage the rules.
How to help solve issues between members.
This clear advice will help them act accordingly in any situation.
Keep ahead of events: From time to time, look at what's happening in your server and clean up when problems arise. That way, minor issues will stay minor.
Step 7: How to Grow and Promote Your Discord Community
While learning how to build a Discord community, promoting your server was one of the key phases. Here are some easy and surefire ways to get that server in front of the right audience:
Share Your Discord Server Link Everywhere: One of the easiest ways to promote your Discord server is by sharing your invite link across your online presence. Please post it on your social media platforms, embed it in your website, and include it in your blog posts. Inviting people to join your Discord is a natural next step if people are already following your content.
Collaborate for Growth: Partnering with other communities or popular influencers who can help you expand your reach. Cross-promote one another's Discord servers: share links to those servers, host events together, or even have shared channels—a win-win strategy to grow both communities and attract more active members into your ranks.
Join Online Communities: Engage yourself actively with your target audience through conversations on subreddits, forums, or niche groups on Facebook. Then, invite them to your Discord Community Server at the right time. It is a perfect method of organic promotion of your Discord Community server while earning customers' trust and credibility.
Step 08: Development of a Friendly and Inclusive Discord Community
A great community isn't built by hosting a server or making a channel- it's built by making the member feel seen, appreciated, heard, and connected. There are some rather simple ways to achieve this:
Know your members:
Know Your Members
However, we all love associating with a band personally; we love it when somebody recalls the details. Just imagine you are connected to the brand community; they ask about your interest in the brands and how they can customize their service. It's just a procedure, but you felt personal, so
Take a little time to learn about the people in your community. Personalizing your interactions shows you care about them as individuals, not just users. That personal touch goes a long way.
Create Fun Environment: Host events that anyone can participate in, like game nights, movie-watch nights, or silly challenges. It's a great way to break the ice and get people chatting; it builds memories to return for.
Be There for Your Members: Be there whenever one of your community members needs your support or advice. Offer support, listen, or lend a helping hand to create an environment where the people can be safe and cared about.
Give Out Fun Rewards: Recognizing those members who go above and beyond should be followed by doling out cool roles or access to exclusive content. Even a shout-out can be good enough. Rewarding the people makes them feel valued and keeps things exciting for everyone else!
Say "Thank You" Often: Never underestimate the power of a simple "thank you." In virtual life, it's very difficult to grab the attention of followers and customers. Whether you're thanking someone for participating, sharing, or being a positive presence, letting people know they matter keeps the vibe warm and welcoming.
These little steps help build community, making people feel valued and want to stick around. Those little steps, words, support, and kindness build space in people's lives that matter a lot.
Step 9: Collect Feedback and Adapt to Build a Thriving Discord Community
Hopefully, now you know how to build a Discord community for your brand. But one of the most important parts is that you can not go slow. Keep your audience engaged by collecting feedback or doing other activities. So, gathering opinions regularly and adjusting based on their needs is essential.
Create a Feedback Channel:
You can achieve this by setting up a feedback channel where members can give suggestions on new features, events, or ways to improve certain channels. It means so much, which shall make your community much more invested in helping mold the space.
Use Polls and Surveys:
You can also use Preference Polls or Surveys to get responses from people in a more structured manner. You can also poll them for ideas on any new event or some possible changes to server rules.
Step 10: Save Audience Voice to Grow Discord Community
After that, the most important thing is to monitor and improve your Discord community constantly. A good community is never done; it needs improvement and changes to keep it fresh and relevant to all its members.
1. Try Out New Features
Discord often comes up with patches and introduces new features worthy of being exploited to test new functionality, including custom bots, threads, or special roles. This will give your server a fresh activity that its members can do since there are different ways now to interact and participate.
2. Review Your Server's Performance Regularly
Go back and occasionally review your community: what is its activity status? Whether the people participate in or comment on the contents. Whether any channels could be removed, they're never used, or rules are too outdated to be updated. Regular check-ins will let you find things to be fixed and keep your server working correctly.
3. Stay Open to Fresh Ideas
And last but not least, be unafraid to try something new. Be it an idea from your members or some new trend you've noticed in other groups, experimentation is the sure path to development. Successful communities develop through flexibility toward new ideas.
5 Other Platforms to Build a Strong Community for Your Brand
If you are still in search of other platforms to create engaging communities like Discord, this part is for you. While looking for an alternative to Discord, there are several options for features and benefits in building a strong community.
1. EzyCourse (Premium)
Imagine having a community that feels like a Facebook feed, but it's specifically designed just for your courses and students. That's what EzyCourse provides. It’s an easy way to set up a personalized, distraction-free space for students to connect, collaborate, and grow.
With EzyCourse, you can create public-private groups, give premium channels, or make money from your community. The best part? Your students can stay in touch and receive updates in real-time at the tip of their fingers with its embedded mobile app.
EzyCourse has everything needed to establish a lively, and positive learning atmosphere to motivate the audience.
Features of EzyCourse Community
Multiple Channel Creation: Set up different channels (premium, locked, public) for specific topics.
Familiar Social-Media Feed: Students can post, comment, react, and share in an easy-to-use format.
Multiple Tabs: You can keep multiple feeds on your community like courses, events, meetings, live streams, and so on.
Post Approval Controls: Provide the ability to manage the content by toggling on and off of post approvals.
Cross-posting and Scheduling: Increase engagement with the facility of cross-posting within groups or at better periods.
Discussion File Sharing: Allow users to share files directly in comments, promoting better collaboration.
Manage Access: You can control who sees your community: public, private, hidden, or restricted.
Engaging Polls and Media-Rich Posts: Keep your community alive by including interactive polls and engaging media items.
Conduct Live Meetings: EzyCourse has Zoom integration, so you can go live from the community.
Gift Coins: The ezyCourse community has a coin gifting feature where any member can gift coins to other members with a click.
Real-Time Notifications: The mobile app provides students with quick updates, ensuring they never miss critical information.
Pros of Using EzyCourse
Reasonable prices: The plans are flexible to suit a range of budgets.
Engagement Tools: Keep your community engaged with the help of polls, file sharing, multimedia updates, reactions, comments, and coin gifting.
Tracking Engagement: Find your most active members by tracking points and rewards to identify who your most active members are and to increase engagement further.
Creator tools: There is a comprehensive collection of all the features a teacher, creator, or entrepreneur could ever need.
Membership Control: Determine who belongs to your community and what each of them sees.
Instant Messaging: User groups and private chat raise the bar in user-to-user communication.
Revenue Opportunities: Options to make a premium channel, premium community, and sell courses and products within your community.
Analytics & Insights: Monitor community performance to improve engagement and growth.
Product Sales: Sell both physical and digital products directly through the platform.
Potential Drawbacks of EzyCourse
No free plan
A credit card is required to get a 14-day free trial.
Pricing Plans
Essential: $59/month
Pro: $139/month
Unlimited: $199/month
Elite: $299/month
when paid annually*
*pricing may be subject to change at any time
2. Slack (Free & Premium)
Slack was originally designed as a workplace communication tool. Still, it also works well for community-building. Slack's clean interface and real-time messaging system make creating channels for different topics easy; thus, keeping things organized is easy.
Slack can enhance collaboration within your community with integrations for everything from Google Drive and Trello to Zoom. Slack best serves professionals and communities that want to have a defined system of communication that offers them ease in file sharing.
Slack Pros
A free basic plan with a minimal set of features
The ability to create channels around different discussion topics was great.
It also integrates well with most productivity tools.
Slack Cons:
It might be a little bit overwhelming for the amateur user.
Paid plans are costly if your team size is larger.
Pricing Plans:
Free: Up to 10,000 most active messages, unlimited DMs, and basic integrations
Standard: $8/user/month, unlimited message history, advanced integrations
Plus: $15/user/month, additional features like single sign-on and data export
3. Facebook Groups (Free)
Facebook Groups represent a light way for marketers to create communities where members can share information, ask questions, and discuss topics. Besides simple ways of publishing updates, holding polls, and planning events, it contains powerful features for moderation and member administration. Because so many consumers are on the service already, it's an easy place to connect with your target demographic.
Facebook Groups Pros:
Completely free to use
Massive user base to grow your community
Easy integration with Facebook's other features like Groups, Pages, and Events
Facebook Groups Cons:
It can be not quiet and distracting due to other Facebook activity
Limited customization options for branding and structure
Pricing Plan:
All the Facebook community functions are free.
4. Mighty Networks (Premium)
Mighty Networks is a powerful community-building platform that lets any company build its own space. You can host your events, paid memberships, online courses, and discussions in one place. The great extent of personalization on the platform will let you make this space truly representative of what your company is.
With Mighty Networks, it's up to you how you want to engage your audience, whether through seminars or even niche communities. It is a powerful platform built for businesses that want to create a unique community space. The platform offers events, paid memberships, online courses, and discussions in one place.
Because of the high degree of personalization on the platform, you can craft a space representing the right image your business needs to portray. With Mighty Networks, whether building special-interest communities or hosting workshops, you're in charge of how you engage your audience.
Mighty Networks Pros:
Very customizable, that space for your brand is unique.
Offers solid features like courses and events.
Great customer support for troubleshooting.
Mighty Networks Cons:
Paid platform, starting at $99/month
This may be overwhelming for first-timers' learning.
Mighty Networks Pricing:
Courses Plan: $99/mo
Courses Plan: $179/mo
Path-to-Pro Plan: $360/mo
Mighty Pro Plan: Contact sales
This, in turn, makes the plan include all of the tools required to make a community engaging, additional monetization of content, and features of AI in limited form. See the pricing page of Mighty Networks for more information.
5. Bettermode
Are you running a large or fast-growing company? Looking for the right community-building platform? Bettermode is designed from scratch to provide both the scale and branded experience businesses need in the community. Whether improving customer engagement or building a user-centric community, BetterMode offers an intuitive experience.
It comes with ready templates on which one may set it up or with integrations to your existing website. BetterMode will help your community grow- whether big or small- with innovative features that include gamification, moderating tools, and detailed statistics.
Bettermode Pros:
It's pretty easy to manage, even in the beginning stages.
Comparatively inexpensive compared to other platforms.
They have great customer support.
Bettermode Cons:
Fewer features compared to more complex platforms
Requires a paid subscription
Bettermode Pricing:
Free version is also available
Starter: $19/month
Growth: $49/month
Enterprise: $99/month
Final Words
Community building involves people's connectivity, value, and involvement. While Discord is indeed a great real-time interaction platform where one can build strong relationships, more often than not, you need something more relevant to your goals. That's where the EzyCourse offers flexibility in an all-in-one, especially to those power users focused on online learning or course creation.
Of course, each has its strengths: If you want high-energy, real-time conversations, you must go with Discord. Meanwhile, EzyCourse does exceptionally well in keeping the content organized and engaging the community of learners. The key is choosing one that fits the right brand and the community you are building.
But at the end of the day, it's whatever platform you create- that space you create where your community feels heard, appreciated, and excited to be on the journey with you. That's what will make your brand's community thrive.
