You've started your Discord community. Fans are gathering to celebrate your brand, driving tangible results. But as the community grows, how do you measure what's happening, and understand where your successes (or failures) come from?

Discord provides a wealth of data analytics to help you understand your community. As a community owner, you can access statistics about your server's growth and activation, showing who's joining and whether they're staying.

How do you see Discord data?

Engagement data shows what members are doing, and what channels they're using. Audience data shows background info and demographics on your members, like where they're from. All of these insights are essential for maximising your community's potential.

You can view this data in daily, weekly and monthly format. You can also specify a date range, sort columns and export charts as CSV files. By viewing short and long-term stats you reveal patterns and allow you to see clear, tangible results of your strategies and experiments.

That means you have hard numbers to show the value of the community, which is useful when allocating budget or convincing stakeholders. And it gives you the feedback you need to manage your community so it grows, thrives and meets your objectives.

These are some of the most crucial community strategies, and key insights you need to know.

Optimising member acquisition

Where do your new members come from? You might think the most important thing is to bring in lots of new members, from wherever you can. But effective member acquisition is a little more nuanced: a thriving community is based on meaningful contributions from members, which means it pays to seek out high intent members who are more likely to bring value to the space.

That means being intentional about where you share and promote your invite link, prioritising traffic sources with fans who will bring something to the space. Think about where you can find potential new high-intent members who will:

• Bring knowledge about the subject of the community
• Help each other and follow the rules
• Engage with the conversation and the community

Key insight: Referrers

Look at your most (and least) engaged members and see where they came from. Focusing your recruitment efforts on priority traffic sources will help you avoid wasting investment on bringing in spammers, trolls and low-intent followers. Use a custom invite link for each platform to capture more detail on referring sources, and even see how much that invite link is shared by fans as you work to grow your community.

Encouraging member engagement

Engagement is crucial to your community. A happy, active community attracts new members (growth), keeps current members coming back (retention) and encourages fans towards revenue-driving activity (monetisation).

Key insight: First week retention

Members are more likely to stay once they have contributed (and ideally received a response from other members), so it's crucial to encourage a first interaction. It's also very simple: most servers simply ask new members to introduce themselves.

You can even incentivise this by rewarding the newcomer with XP (experience points) for their first message, and for each message they post. First day activation is a useful metric, followed by first week retention: the number of members who sign up and are still using the server a week later.

Maintaining engagement

Once a member is signed up, they'll keep coming back if there are interesting things to come back for. This requires an investment of time and imagination by the community owner, but members are keen to take that effort and run with it. In a truly engaged community, members generate their own conversations, and the community's interaction becomes almost self-sustaining.

Fortunately, there's a huge range of proven engagement strategies that can be mixed and matched to suit any brand, including:

• Activations, campaigns and games
• Product launches, releases and sales (including Discord exclusive)
• Questions, polls and prompts
• Fresh content, news and teasers
• Gamification and XP
• Facilitation of peer-to-peer interactions, collaboration and meetups

Key insight: Participation rate

Every time you utilise an engagement strategy you can see how the community reacts, and plan future strategies accordingly. It can be as simple as checking how many emoji reactions a post gets. But the key metric here is participation rate, which shows how many members are engaging.

If the community doesn't react to a strategy or isn't using a particular channel, don't be afraid to avoid that tactic in future or close down inactive channels. The good news is that your community will often tell you what they like or don't like. Be open to suggestions from members and try adjusting your tactics, ideally with the help of experienced community management experts.

Tailoring content

The audience server insights gives you an idea of the makeup of your community, so you can tailor your content accordingly. For example, you can see how members access Discord, on desktop or mobile devices. If a majority prefer mobile, you may want to keep posts short or prioritise vertical photos and video.

You can also see if members are new to Discord itself, which means you need to be conscious of their learning curve when using the server.

Key insight: Location demographics

Knowing where your audience comes from is useful for tailoring the language and conversation, especially if there are different cultural expectations about the way members treat each other or the topics they talk about. It's also important for monetisation opportunities, as you ensure members can access product sales. You can even use the data to plan live events and tours in places where you know you have a fanbase, securing massive ticket sales.

A happy healthy community

Discord provides a wealth of data which helps you understand and steer your community, driving value for your brand. You can take that to the next level when you work with Levellr. We work with clients from music artists like Fall Out Boy to global brands like Starbucks, providing brands with a wealth of custom metrics in a simple-to-use community owner dashboard.

Key insight: Happiness

It's crucial to monitor metrics like engagement, churn rate and more, but it's easy to get overwhelmed. Levellr's dashboard provides a clear high-level guide to the health of the community with our happiness metric.

Contact Levellr today to discover how our custom data analytics enhance the Discord experience so you can build a community which works for your brand.