If You Build it, Will They Come?
Everyone knows that building a community is hard work. There is no secret sauce to make a community coalesce around a product or company. Anyone who says there is? They’re lying. Building an online community is one of the trickiest for a brand to do.
A lot of brand Discord servers start with the assumption that customers will be happy to hang out in a brand server allowing the brand to leverage those community members to their advantage. Unfortunately people are smarter than that and recognize when a community is another marketing tool. So, how do you build a community for your brand in a way that is meaningful not only to the brand but also to community members? Here are three steps we’ve found helpful in building a successful community:
1. Have a clear understanding of the goal of the community. This is more difficult than you would think. Most communities have a goal of getting X members of the server, but that isn’t what you need to do. You need to think of what you want those members to do and build your community around that goal. Do you want the community to provide feedback or to become brand evangelists? Those are both specific goals that you can build a community around.
2. Don’t chase numbers. Discord is not a traditional social media platform. It is not one way communication with the brand talking to followers. The larger your server the harder it is to manage and harder to stay within the community goal. It is fine to have a goal for the number of members but remember that the goal of the community is more important than the number of members in that community. It is always better to have fewer active community members than a bunch of members who don’t participate.
3. Brand participation is a must. You can’t only rely on community management to keep your community happy. You need to involve people from deep inside the brand. This gives people a reason to come to the server because they will be able to interact with the important people of the brand. If you build your community around a product, having the people who actually built the product in the server is a huge bonus to the community.
If you build your community keeping these three things in mind you are already miles ahead of most brand servers. Need help? Hit us up.
