I recently conducted a survey about how people use Discord in an effort to improve my own community. In the survey I asked 8 primary questions:
- How did you first learn about Discord?
- How many servers are you currently a member of?
- What do you use Discord for?
- How often do you use Discord?
- What compels you to join a server?
- What compels you to be active in a server?
- What discourages or prevents you from being active in a server? (including muting or leaving a server)
- What does your ideal Discord community look like?
Let’s dive in with some pretty pictures! 🙌
Analysis of the Results
Right off the bat, some of the findings were exactly what I was expecting: most users join Discord, and specific communities, because of a friend. Also not surprisingly, the average user is in many communities (more than 10), and as a result, cites too much conversation as being the main reason for not participating in a community. This would suggest to me that the typical user is looking for:
- A server that their friends are in
- Smaller servers where they can keep up and actively participate without getting overwhelmed
- Servers with contests/competitions and giveaways
You’ll notice that I left off the responses for “What does your ideal Discord community look like?”. This was a free-form question with a wide range of responses, but suffice to say, several of the answers backed up the above analysis.
I also observed a specific type of user in the data: “the silent type”. 🤐 i.e. Discord users who are in communities, viewing content, but not actively engaging. Unfortunately, Discord doesn’t offer any visibility into this (yet), so I can’t say how many users like this are in the Cosmocat server.
Key Takeaways
So what am I going to do with these findings? How am I going to apply them to the Cosmocat Discord server? I would say my top three takeaways are:
- Word of mouth trumps everything: find ways to have existing members bring their friends to the server (a referral bonus of sorts?)
- Run more contests, competitions and giveaways (although I’d say in some cases the engagement wasn’t high enough to really justify this)
- Find ways to engage the “silent type”. They may not feel like chatting, but perhaps I can encourage reactions as a way of participating.
Is there something you’re seeing in the results that I’m not? Is there something you’d like to see in the Cosmocat Discord that I didn’t cover? Just let me know, preferably via Discord! 😉