Growth Guide: Maintaining Members — Part 2
You have your server made, and members are beginning to trickle into your newly made community. You’re getting ready to chat with everyone and — wait… where are your members going? Why are they leaving soon after they join? How can you get your members to stay in your server?
Activity
An important part of maintaining a growing community is keeping up the activity on the server. Some people even weigh activity to be more important than member growth when building up a server. How does one keep a server active? There are a handful of different ideas to keep up the activity of a server, where different methods
Events
Holding community events is one of the best ways to break the ice between members of your community, and increase the activity of your server. There are a number of different types of events that can be held on a server; watching movies together, doing karaoke, playing games, making crafts, holding debates, show-and-tell, and much more!
With Discord bots, you can organize trivia games, listen to music together, or just host fun community-based events. By organizing these, your server’s members will tell their friends about these events too, and your server will get a lot more exposure as a result.
It’s relatively easy to organize events; just find a music Discord bot that can play YouTube videos, such as Onyx and then tell your members that they can play their favorite videos all evening. Just organize a time when the majority of your server’s members are free, and then off you go! You can even include karaoke to spice up your event.
Bots
Keep in mind that bots may be an effective way to increase activity, but it is not a very powerful/favorable method. Another way of maintaining activity on a server is adding bots that the community finds fun and easy to use. Now, keep in mind that there are hundreds of discord bots, but you don’t want more than maybe 1/20 of your full member count, starting with 3 (moderation bot, and 2 fun bots) and no more than 10 bots. With this, it is best to either watch your community using the bots, or specifically ask your community which bots they like best. The bots that aren’t used much shouldn’t be added to the server. Make sure to watch and pay attention to what your community likes and doesn’t like with the bots, and eventually you’ll find the perfect bots for your server.
Connections
This isn’t connecting with other people directly, per say, but rather making connections through different media. For example, if you’re a YouTuber or a Twitch Streamer or an artist or etc., you may want to use your server as like a fan-base community or a community of followers. If you made a server, but don’t have any of these type of connections, it’s never too late to express you talent and build your community from there. This method isn’t for everyone, but for those who it applies to, it’s a great way of promoting activity on the server, because the community will always have something in common… you!
Friendly Atmosphere
Speaking of welcoming, it greatly increases activity when the atmosphere as a whole is friendly and lively. This means to welcome in new members as they join, and get to know them more. Also, try to stay away from using negative language when talking with your community, or posting in rules or about the server things. Additionally, try to get other member to talk with one another by bring up similar interests for those people to talk about. Activity won’t start unless you take the first step!
When a member joins your server, make sure they get a great welcome. There are plenty of bots that provide automatic welcomes, just in case your server becomes incredibly popular, and the server owner won’t have the time or energy to welcome potentially tens of new users every day!
Even better, in the early stages, if you can welcome your users personally, this would mean an incredible deal to them. Your server won’t be receiving hundreds of new users initially, (well, sometimes it might, depends!), so you might be able to ask your users some questions about why they joined. Be chatty, friendly, of course, and your users will love to stick around. There’s nothing like a great welcome to make a fantastic impact!
Keep in Mind. . .
No matter how many people you have in your server, there will always be people inactive. When I say this, I mean lots of inactive people. For instance, I’ve seen thousands upon thousands of people in a server, only a couple hundred were active, and although that sounds like a lot of people, compared to the overall amount of people that are in the server, that would only be roughly 1/100 of the server that’s active.
I know it can be very discouraging when in your server and not a lot of people are active in it, but with overall growth that occurs over time, so will the activity. It’s slightly a numbers game, and no matter how hard you work for it, some people just will always remain inactive in a server.
Citations
Images: Chowder©
