Social media has become the most powerful channel to promote nearly anything, including crypto, Web3, & NFT projects. Twitter has become the main platform to announce news & updates and curate a community for crypto-related projects. However, Twitter has a major downside, which is related to the two-way communication with your community – meaning through tweets, threads or direct messages. In short, it doesn’t have a closed group function.
This brings an opportunity for another application to take the spotlight mainly focusing on curating a community and acting like a hub for each member to communicate with each other and with the project’s founders, developers, and other team members. Discord does that and more, allowing projects to create their own community server that is fully customizable to their requirements including the integration of simple chat rooms to something as sophisticated as creating and integrating bots to do different things for the community externally and internally.
In this article, we will share tips, tricks, and ways to utilize Discord as an NFT marketing and community management tool. This is not limited to NFT projects only but can encompass the whole Web3 & Crypto space.
What makes Discord special for NFT marketing?
Discord has been the leading solution enabling communities & people to connect with each other through multiple formats, including video, voice, text, and cross-integration through utilising customizable bots. Discord allows the freedom for each community owner to customize their own servers to their community needs. This in return allows owners to create a sense of belonging in their communities where Discord becomes a hub for everyone to share questions, answers, announcements, and news, and host different events, parties, and important conversations and discussions. All of this and more, is completely free of cost for both the owner and the community members, with some additional perks that are paid to enhance the quality of the server for the users.
How do servers work on Discord?
Servers on Discord are simply user-created chat rooms that may be customized. When you sign up for a server, you can communicate with other users via voice and text, share files and media, and work together on projects. Users may be given various roles and rights inside a server, and each server has its own set of rules and regulations.
The capacity to control the server’s membership and activity, including establishing rules and regulating discussions, belongs to the server administrators. By adding channels, roles, and other features, they can also alter the server’s look and operation.
Discord offers different types of servers for anyone to create and curate a community on. This way Discord is able to be broad in targeting different groups of people, while also being specific to curate niche groups like NFT enthusiasts, Decentralized Science communities, and more. It is mandatory to learn about the use cases of Discord to be able to utilize this tool for NFT marketing. Most of the successful NFT projects have done NFT marketing on Discord and succeeded in creating an active community server.
Types of Discord servers & their utility
Discord offers multiple types of servers catering to different types of people, organizations, and communities. Let’s break them down and understand their differences while focusing on the two core types that are widely used by Crypto, Web3, and NFT projects.
• Individual/Personal Discord Server
These types of servers are usually catered towards individuals that want to create their own Discord server to invite a couple of friends to hang out, mostly used between a group of friends with an open goal or specific goals (i.e, gaming, studying, researching, and etc.). Usually, these servers are closed and invite-only with minimal customization as the number of users is quite low (averages between 5-20 people per server).
Tip – Create this type of Discord server if you want to group friends and have a clean space to interact, avoid switching this server to “Community Server” to avoid bots and spammers from joining. Make it private and invite-only. These types of servers can also be used for Web3, Crypto, and NFT projects looking to have their own team members’ personal space though it’s not mandatory and not recommended.
• Open Community Discord Server
These are the more common type of Discord servers where they are open for everyone to join through a permanent invite link. These servers are usually hosted by projects, organizations, and communities from different areas, industries, and spaces. Most Web3, Crypto, and NFT projects utilize this type of Discord server to curate a large community of people that follow the project and join the server to gain knowledge, interact with others, share their opinions, ask questions, and get involved in discussions. Creating a community Discord server is completely free and the customizations are limitless, this is where a good community management team is mandatory to run a professional Discord server using rules, titles, channels (private & public), anti-spam bots, and more.
Tip – What makes a great Open Community Discord server is not the amount of customization or bots integrated, it is the quality of people in the server. You can join a server that has 1,000 people that are active, verbal, and helpful to the growth of the project while you can also join a server that has 100,000 people and is quiet, filled with spammers, and overall lacks quality. Remember that you are a Web3, Crypto, or NFT project looking to curate a healthy community to promote growth, and avoid attracting people that will stir away quality members. This can be done by commuting with your target audience, making sure they are genuine, and removing anyone that doesn’t respect the community and the code of conduct. A successful community server needs to be a place where people feel safe, secure, and free to share their voices and opinion.
• Token Gated Community Discord Server
With the growth of Web3, Crypto, and recently NFT projects a large number of open community Discord servers have been compromised by spammers and bots that are causing chaos and in some cases engaging in fraudulent activities. Although there are many ways to combat that, some projects decided to weed out these spammers and bots by gating their community servers. This can be established by integrating a bot that verifies each user entering the Discord server against specific criteria (in the case of Web3, Crypto, and NFT project the number of tokens or NFTs held in their wallets). For example, an NFT project that gates their community and only allows the holders of their NFTs to join by presenting their public wallet address and verifying the signature through a bot that is integrated into Discord. This way only the NFT holders will be able to join the server, removing all the spammers and automatically curating a community of holders that share the same vision and work together towards the growth of the project.
Running a Token Gated Community is becoming more prominent between crypto and blockchain based projects, the flexibility in curating a community and the removal of spammers/bots is essential for the growth of the project. We are now also seeing many more unique and innovative use cases by enabling Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) to operate directly through a Token Gated Discord Community. For example, a DAO can create a batch of NFTs that are used as a membership/access-point to the DAO’s Discord server, this means that only the NFT holders will be able to join, vote, and take decisions on the direction of the project. That’s a powerful tool enabling decentralization and collective consensus to drive a project.
Tip – Even Token Gated Community Discord servers need to be managed properly, so a strong community management team is mandatory to ensure the quality of discussions remains high. Discord can be a strong Web3 marketing tool just like Twitter Spaces for crypto marketing if used correctly; this is why project founders must invest in a strong community management team. If you are a Crypto or NFT project you can gate your Discord server using your own Crypto tokens or NFTs by integrating specific bots that can be customized to verify your wallet address against your token’s smart contract.
Conclusion
A strong community management team is mandatory for the success of your Web3, Crypto, and NFT projects. Regardless if you want to run an Open/Closed Community Discord server it is important to focus on the quality of community members to promote growth. At what.digital we focus on Crypto marketing through unique ways that are specific to Web3 projects, we understand the importance of a strong community and we utilize all the Web3, Crypto, and NFT marketing tools to curate a healthy community.