What are you missing without Discord?
Gen Z engagement. Discord is an important hub for millions of people, particularly those in Gen Z, and it gets power from being a platform you can customize. No matter what activities you’re involved in, you have information that could reach these people in a valuable way. You can build a brand, a game, or a platform by building a community in Discord. If you’re building something, and you want people from Gen Z in the mix, I highly recommend building a Discord.
How to Start
Don’t start a new idea. Build a Discord to influence what you’re doing right now! Knowing what your community provides is key, and will drive all of your value and outreach. Moving forward, we’ll look back at a Discord that I built and why it worked.
The three components of community value
Having some unique component of value in your Discord gives you your reason to invite people, and without that, there’s no destination. The first Discord I built was valuable because of one piece of information: where and when local Rocket League events were taking place. The information was easy to uncover, and to be honest, we only had news every few weeks. That Discord became a community of hundreds of engaged gamers in the matter of a couple of years.
Information gives you sharing power
Exposing valuable information, even if it’s not information you own, is a great way to start building a community. Information is the easiest place to start, in my opinion, and enables you to relentlessly share what your Discord provides to the world. For example, the Rocket League Discord was the centralized place for people to find out about local tournaments. From there, I could share the link with people at tournaments, in facebook groups, on reddit, and anywhere else I thought it might be of value. You’re giving something when you share a good Discord with people – so evangelize it!
Engagement gives you staying power
After information, building some engagement is key. Information is just as easy to put on a website as a Discord, so people will come to your Discord for other people. Get a few voice channels, and plan some early events. The events don’t have to be a heavy lift – it can be as small as a games night, impromptu hackathon, or watch party. But get the people to start participating, and soak up their cool ideas. They’ll tell you what features and information can make the community better, but ultimately they’ll stay around because of the relationships they develop. The Skillquest Community Discord is a place where users can reach out directly to the instructors who teach courses, and we often have impromptu sessions where we build together.
Features differentiate you
One of Discord’s superpowers is customization. With bots, you can do anything a human can do, but automate it. You can pair this with information and engagement to build your Discord into a place of highly unique value. The Rocket League server thrived because we had a bot where people could play pickup games through a simple queueing system (using features to build engagement). You could just as easily search the web for news about your topic to double-down on your information value. But don’t get too complicated – keep the things that work the best, so that the place doesn’t get confusing.
How to start your Discord bot
If you’re interested in learning more about building features, learn to build your own Discord bot in a few minutes through the Quest. You can also join the Skillquest Discord and shoot me (Tero) a DM. If you want to hear more about Skillquest daily, follow me on Twitter @CorbinFonville.