Discord Guide: How to Build an Engaging Blockchain or NFT Community

In today's world, communities are essential for every business, but in the world of blockchain, communities are critical to the project's success and growth. Communities have fuelled the development and evolution of the crypto industry since the introduction of blockchain technology and Bitcoin.

All big crypto projects, such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Crypto kitties, have a strong community behind them. You can have a massive following on various social media sites, but these platforms provide very little interaction for creating a community. So,  to build a community around your product, you will need a platform where people can interact primarily with you.

That's where Discord can come in handy for your blockchain project. Discord was created in 2015 for gamers, has since been adopted by several other markets, including significant crypto projects such as OpenSea, Decentraland, and Rarible, as a place to interact, talk, share resources, go live and do much more.

What is Discord?

Discord is a forum-style group messaging software that combines video, voice, and text communication into a single platform. Discord is becoming an increasingly important destination for creators, marketers, and users. With 140 million active monthly users, a figure that has more than doubled since 2019. It has played an essential part in various industries, including entertainment, politics, cryptocurrency, and many more. Because of the diversity of services, many crypto projects are migrating from platforms such as Slack and Telegram to Discord.

Discord is divided into servers, which are community platforms with their members, topics, rules, and channels. Servers can provide different types of channels, enabling members to communicate via text and voice. Discord has a plethora of features that make it an excellent choice for your blockchain project.

Discord's Features

1. Servers

Servers are different community rooms that are hosted on Discord. They can be public (large communities with hundreds or thousands of members) or private (smaller, more exclusive invite-only groups). You can set up your own server and ask your fans from various social media platforms to join your community.

2. Text channel

Text channels are areas within the server where server members can communicate through text, photos, or videos. You can create many different text channels within one server for all individual topics based on your project and target audience's interest.

3. Voice and video channel

Voice channels are areas where community members can communicate through voice and video. These channels are more like a 'Room' than a voice call - you simply click on the voice channel to join. This lets other members know you're in there, allowing them to join the channel and communicate with all the other people in the voice channel.

4. Manage your server through roles and permission

You are not limited to just one Discord group within your server, unlike groups on Facebook, Telegram, and other social media sites. The text and audio channels can be configured, and access to these channels can be restricted using specified roles and permissions. Owners, administrators, moderators, and members will all have different levels of access to the channels.

This helps in planning with the team on one channel while interacting with customers on the other channel. You can refine even further by creating unique groups for certain members, a channel solely for your token or NFT holders, or even niche channels for different departments, such as an engineering support group or another channel for marketing.

5. Automate your server using bots

Discord Bots, top.gg, and Bots on Discord are the most popular websites for finding Discord bots. Discord Bots help automate tasks like welcoming new members, screening out spammers, and banning users who violate server rules, among other things. To add a bot to your Discord server, you must first select one online and invite it to your server. You can also build your own custom bots and upload them to Discord's Development Portal.

Best practices for your Discord server

Create a Welcome screen

Create a personalized welcome screen for new server members so that they know what your community is all about and where to start. In this way, users can jump right into the correct channels without getting lost.

Have a channel for announcements

An announcement channel allows you to broadcast important messages to everyone on your server. Your community members can "Follow" the announcement channel to receive essential updates directly on their own server.

Stage channels

You can share audio conversations with a small group of members through stage channels that can be listened to by up to 1000 community members. Members can request to be called up on stage and participate in the dialogue for others to listen.

A channel mentioning community rules

Create a channel specifically for rules and guidelines on how members should interact in your community.

Ideas to grow and engage with your Discord community

Make your own server-specific emojis.

In Discord, you can convert any image into a customized emoji and upload it to your server, where anyone on the server can use it. Every Discord server can have its library of emojis for its members, which provides a broader, more expressive range of animated emoticons to all users. This is yet another characteristic of the platform that makes it great for creators and brands since it allows them to build specialized and loyal communities in a fun and engaging manner.

Go live using stages.

Discord recently launched stages, which allows you to broadcast a controlled discussion with a selected group of people to a large group of listeners, and it's ideal for interviews or AMAs. You can create a questionnaire ahead of time to collect questions from your community members.

You can also use Go Live to share your screen or show a specific app in real-time. You can continue to interact in text and voice channels while screen sharing on Discord. You can use this feature to provide a sneak peek inside your project or a full tour of your product or service's features.

Moderate your community

Based on how your community is set up and the number of people in it, you will most likely need people such as managers, moderators, and influencers to help run it. Admins and moderators collaborate to manage the community and are often the trusted authority to whom your community will turn for any queries or problems. 

Create a channel for customer support

Because you can quickly conduct exclusive conversations with members on Discord, it is a far better platform for offering customer care. Simply click on the member's name to send messages to them.  Using Discord to handle customer complaints builds a community atmosphere that will keep customers coming back. It is one of the most effective methods of engaging potential or current consumers.

Pro tip: Use a customer service bot to raise tickets on behalf of members of your community.

Gamify your community

Gamification is an excellent strategy for increasing community engagement. By introducing a gaming element into your community, you will foster positive competition among your community members. Every month, reveal and reward the members with the most points; other members will step up their game to win next month's recognition and prize. This will keep your members coming back for more. It's a simple concept, yet it has a significant impact on increasing community engagement.

Most importantly – give them a reason to stay.

As your server grows, it's critical to keep everyone interested in being a member of your community. People from all around the world will join your Discord community because they want to become a part of something bigger, and you and your moderators are the ones who make that happen. It's a good idea to take a step back and ask yourself the following questions frequently:

- What are some ideas for energizing your community and giving people a reason to stay?

- What distinguishes your community from the rest, and how can you leverage that spark?

To build a community, you must provide value while also being sensitive to that group. The key to maintaining a strong community is to deliver excellent content continually.