Growing Discord Server : The Hard Problem (and Solution)

Relax! You are not the only one finding it difficult to grow your community on Discord servers. You probably have seen active Discord servers with 200,000+ members and wondering how they got there.

Growing a Discord community is extremely hard. In this article, I’ll share a few proven ways to grow your Discord server bigger in size; but there is no guarantee that it will be an active server.

If you are thinking that this article is ‘negative’, you are right. I am not a fan of building communities on Discord because it’s like building a community in the ‘hard-mode’.

Lot of community managers fall for “go where your audience is” and end up clueless why no one is joining or participating in their community.

Problems with Building Community on Discord

First of all, and contrary to the popular belief, Discord is not a community building platform. Discord started out as a real-time chat tool for gamers and it’s really good at that. The problem began when people started referring gaming groups as ‘community’.

If you are building a serious community, please take away your community from Discord. If you are fond of adding unnecessary challenges in your life and complicate otherwise simple things; welcome to building community on Discord.

Discord is painful for:

Customer Communities: No one can find valuable answers offered earlier. As community manger, you’ll end-up answer same questions over and over.
Professional Communities: Discord is optimised for chats. Everything you write will vanish within hours, never to be discovered again.
Advocacy Groups: Impossible to build a momentum because all your strategies have disappeared faster than a hot cake at a meetup.

In addition, Discord keeps going from bad to worse for communities with their feature updates like: No image previews in searches, removing in-channel filters, eliminating ability to search across the entire server.

Growing Discord Server : The Hard Problem (and Solution) The overall result is so frustrating that you begin to question the reasons you started community on Discord in first place.

Discord also hides 100% of your content from Google; and people cannot find your community unless they find a link to it on some landing page. Onboarding remains a constant challenge with every Discord community.

Steps to Grow your Discord Community

I have a special respect for people who like to add challenges and play with fire. Now that you are adamant about keeping your community on Discord; here are few things you may try. Be willing to spend a LOT of time and effort into this. I advise you to start ignoring people growing their communities while enjoying life and sipping coffee.

Build a landing page

In order to drive traffic to your Discord server, you’ll need a landing page. Here’s how the user-flow will look like:

User → Landing Page → Discord server membership page → Community

You will have to work on building traffic to your landing page through SEO. That’s the only way your Discord server can grow bigger in size.

Leverage Social Media

Because your Discord community misses out on free traffic through Google, you will have to constantly work on sharing your community on social media. Stats show that about 2% of the people who read your social media post will click on the link.

About 0.5% of the people who clicked on your link will actually go through the sign-up process if your landing page convinces them about the value.

Note: This is a subpar conversion ratio compared to open communities where the content is exposed to people (and Google) without having to create account.

List on Discord Directories

List your Discord server in Discord server lists. Here’s the list of 15 popular Discord server lists you should be listed on:

Top.gg: top.gg/servers
DISBOARD: disboard.org
Discords.com: discords.com/servers
Discord Street: discord.st
DiscordMe: discord.me/servers
Discord Servers: discordservers.com
Discord List: discordlist.com
DiscordSL: discordsl.com
Discord Home: discordhome.com
DiscordTree: discordtree.com
Discord Server: discord-server.com
Discadia: discadia.com
DiscordHub: discordhub.com/servers
Discord Center: discord.center
Discord List Me: discordlist.me

Cross Promote on Similar Servers

This is a popular strategy to keep onboarding new members to your Discord community. But there’s a high chance of moderators kicking you out. Participate in discussions and create value for the other competing Discord servers. Then, make a subtle mention of your own Discord server.

I’ve known a friend who got his first 500 members through this technique. It took him about 8 months; but he’s no complaints.

Partner with Micro-Influencers

Discover the micro-influencers in your community niche. Partner with them, host AMA sessions or collaborate with them to to advertise and promote your Discord among their audience.

Be willing to spend money to collaborations; because most influencers will charge fees to promote your Discord.

Organize Giveaways

It’s similar to bribing users to join your Discord; but can give you good results. A popular Discord community uses exclusive giveaways to attract members. They announce their giveaways on social media; and require users to join their server to be eligible for the giveaway.

A better Alternative to Discord

I know this is not what you came here for. But hear me out. I’ve been building communities for nearly 20 years. I have a good knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in the community space.

If you are building a serious community - make it an open community. Community SEO is underrated growth-hack but can do wonders. Jatra (this platform) is an example of an open community - and you discovered this article because we exposed it to Google.

I'm an active member in a couple discord servers - I think generally much smaller ones tend to be better, especially when there's a core group of friends who hangout in the space. Or ones with specific pulls like live events or stuff that happens there. Otherwise especially as the community gets too big it's super hard to engage and build genuine relationships.

In the early days of building Cleve I assembled like a core group of my friends who were also product people, software devs and stuff to get feedback on what we're building and connect with each other. That was pretty effective and so so fun, especially at the scale of 10-30 people who kind of knew each other or knew me personally, though beyond that with strangers I've found it super hard.

I think that's generally the challenge with the consumer social platforms where they're great for friends meeting and hanging out - which I think is Discord's core thesis - but might not be as good as things scale for bigger communities.