How to Set Up an NFT Discord Server | Top Channels and Bots for 2022

Ty Smith0:07

What is up guys? Welcome to another episode of the Crypto Marketing Podcast. I'm Ty Smith. In this episode, we are going to cover Discord for NFT companies. So, NFTs are obviously blowing up still. Thought they'd go away a couple months ago, not even close, blowing up more lively than ever before. And Discord has definitely grown as the de facto communication method for these NFT communities. So, everyone from Bored Ape Yacht Club to the Wanderers to every NFT collection in between, they've found significant success largely in part to their ability to cultivate these communities online that are super engaged, and all these conversations are taking place on Discord. So, in this episode, we're going to cover five channels you need to know when you're setting up your Discord channel, as well as five bots that are going to make your life a whole lot easier. So, let's dive right into it.

Ty Smith0:59

So, channels. All right, first one is perhaps one of the most basic. It is the "start here" welcome chat. It's called something different for each channel, sorry. And this is basically the first place that anyone is going to see and join when they join your Discord. This is a good place to point people in the right direction as far as rules, which is something we'll get into in a minute, as well as just get them verified. Or there's a lot of hoops you can make people jump through to prove that they're not a bot. They can be clicking on emojis, sending a certain message. A lot of that will tie in with the bots that we're going to cover very shortly. But this is basically the first point of contact for people to kind of learn about what you're working on and then serve as kind of a resource to where they go next.

Ty Smith2:25

The next one is rules. So, there's a channel set up for rules in most NFT communities. This will cover everything from just how to treat people in the Discord. Everyone's kind of got their own tone as far as what they want the Discord community to act like. It basically just says don't be a dick, to be honest. That's what most communities kind of explain. No spam, no shilling are other common rules that you'll find in an NFT Discord group. If you're looking to write your own rules, I honestly recommend going to an NFT community that you're a fan of and just copying theirs and kind of making tweaks based on what you want your community to look like. This definitely helps later when your community blows up because people will do things that are in violation of those rules and they'll say, "Well, I didn't know that was against the rules," if you don't have your rules ironed out. And it makes it really easy for, for example, for an agency like us who provides Discord moderation services, our mods are very easily able to point to the rules and say, "You did this wrong, this wrong," and it's grounds to either kick them or warn them or ban them, whatever it might be. So, number two, rules.

Ty Smith4:12

Number three is verify. So, if you have a live NFT collection that people can actually buy and hold, you can set up a verify channel that uses a bot that we'll discuss shortly called Collab.Land. There's other options as well, but Collab.Land is probably the most popular. That will allow someone to sign in with their MetaMask, prove that they own a certain type of NFT, your NFT collection, and then get a certain role, which gives them additional permissions in Discord. So, that is number three.

Ty Smith5:23

Number four is the announcement channel. So, this announcement channel is really served for internal to external communication from your team to the rest of the community. It's pretty common to make this read-only, meaning that the community can only see the messages, they can't type anything in there. They could just do emoji responses. Super important channel to get news out because it's going to get really lost in most other channels. The announcement channel is a kind of one-stop shop for everyone to see what the team is up to.

Ty Smith5:57

And the fifth one and final one that we will cover today is the general channel. So, general channel is probably the most basic one. It's just a general chat for the community to speak with each other. You can kind of manage this however you want. Most people leave it pretty unstructured. For more structured conversation, whether it's buying and selling NFTs or talking about a certain NFT collection or talking about other NFTs, they'll build out separate channels. But with these five channels, you should be pretty covered. So, let's go into some bots you can use. So, bots are a super useful tool for just moderating your community, kind of enabling these power-ups that otherwise are not possible with Discord. A really cool thing about Discord as a technology is that it has an open API that basically any developer can build upon. Even if you're not a developer, they honestly make the resources available to you that you can kind of learn how to create bots that do what you want them to do. So, with that, there's a lot of cool bots that the crypto community in general has already created that you can plug into your community.

Ty Smith7:36

So, number one, probably my favorite on the list is MEE6. It's spelled M-E-E-6. That bot does kind of a little bit of everything, honestly. You can set up verifications like I was saying with the "start here" welcome channel. It's called reaction roles there, which basically means someone joins in and it says, "Hey, to prove you're not a bot, please click on the green checkmark emoji or the smiley face emoji." And a bot won't do that, so it's like a good way to keep your community kind of clean. That's just one thing that they do. They will also do syncing with your social media channels. So, you can set it very easily so that whenever your Twitter account tweets something, it gets pushed to a particular channel in your Discord group. If I was to add a sixth channel that everyone should have, it's a socials channel where you can have Instagram, YouTube, Twitch, Twitter, all those things. MEE6 bot will allow you to push notifications directly to your Discord community.

Ty Smith7:37

I think it's slightly cheaper. I think it's like $3 or $4 per month, whereas MEE6 bot I think is $14 per month or a one-time fee of about $90. So if you're budget conscious and you're just kind of testing something out, Dyno bot might be for you. Otherwise, I recommend going with MEE6 bot.

Ty Smith7:50

Number three, we alluded to before, Collab.Land. Collab.Land basically makes it easy to sign in with MetaMask, prove that you own a certain NFT, and then with that, again, get a role added to you automatically, and then you get access to certain channels. So Bored Ape Yacht Club is a great example of a company that does something similar where you have to sign in with MetaMask, prove that you have a Bored Ape Yacht Club, and then you get access to channels that only holders can get. Great way to get people incentivized to buy your NFT or be part of the community and hold an NFT.

Ty Smith8:21

Number four is Gas Tracker. So Gas Tracker is essentially, it doesn't really do anything other than on the side of your Discord server, it's going to show you the price of gas. So obviously, if you're an Ethereum-based NFT community, you're probably frequently looking at the price of gas just because you don't want to be minting something when gas is like 200 plus. It just gets really expensive, so it's an easy way for someone to just quickly reference what the cost of gas is and then decide if they want to mint or buy or whatever, do anything with NFTs.

Ty Smith8:53

The next bot, very similar, is the Ethereum Price Bot. It shows the price of Ethereum, as you might imagine. And those are the top five bots I would recommend for setting up your NFT Discord group.

Ty Smith9:06

We have been doing a ton of work with NFT companies lately at Coinbound. If it's something that you're interested in exploring, whether it's help setting up your Discord group, you just kind of want another set of eyes on how you have it, because again, everything is, we've kind of provided the basics of what you should set up, but there are endless possibilities. And honestly, I've looked at hundreds of NFT Discord groups, no two are alike. They get very creative with the names, you can even name the bots different things. So you really can make it your own, and that's kind of the exciting part of being in the NFT world is that, at the end of the day, NFTs are communities online, at least how they're currently being kind of blown up. And you can definitely create the kind of community that you're proud of, that you want people to participate in by using these Discord groups.

Ty Smith9:54

So that will be all that we cover today. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me on Twitter. My DMs are always open, @TyDanielSmith. And we'll talk soon. Bye.