How to Leverage the Platform to Connect and Build a Digital Community for Your Brand
What is Discord?
Discord is the premier community-building platform for digital natives with massive scale and reach:
150 Million Monthly Active Users
19 Million Active Servers per Week
4 Billion Server Conversation Minutes Daily Source: About Discord | Our Mission and Values
Approximately 563 million registered users Source: Discord global registered users 2023 | Statista
Discord is not a typical social media platform, but instead, the most popular Instant messaging and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) platform made for people to hang out and communicate with friends or groups of similar interests through text or voice chat, share memes and screenshots, stream content, and most importantly build community via their Server. A Discord Server is meant for users to grow connections and relationships with people of similar interests and provide an ongoing dialogue with each other instead of posting content and gaining followers like social media apps. The platform is the perfect space for brands to empower the community to drive conversations on popular topics to create long-term, meaningful advocates and fans.
Who uses Discord?
Most Discord users are between 25 and 34, making up 42.4% of its users, and 16 to 24 years account for 22.2% of users. As for gender, males dominate the user base at 65.5%, while the female population makes up the remaining 34.5%. The average age of a Discord user is 16 years old.
For comparison:
Twitch is 65% Male / 35% Female Twitch Statistics (2023)
Twitter is 64.3% Male / 35.7% Female Twitter Digital Insights
Reddit is 63% male / 32% female Reddit Statistics
Geographically, the United States takes the lead in account creation, coming in with 244.5 million users - equivalent to 27% of Discord’s global traffic. Beyond the U.S Brazil holds second place with 115.9 million users or 12.8%, Russia with 39.9 million users or 4.4%, India at 38.4 million users (4.24%), and The UK with 34.8 million or 3.85%.
Source: Discord Users by Country 2023
Why Do People Use Discord?
Unlike most social platforms, Discord is less about the server’s owner posting content pieces and the interaction from it and more focused on communication and community building. Discord is free to use, making it one of the most popular online communication methods. It offers its users various features like voice, video, and text chat, making it one of the most popular online communication methods. It does have a premium paid model to upgrade user accounts as well as support the various servers a user joins.
Discord is a great place for users to have smaller group messages, belong to servers that relate to their interests/hobbies, partake in Q&As/topic discussions, watch and host streams, and more!
Although Discord has been previously known as a chat platform for just gamers, it features an array of chat servers covering a wide range of topics as technology to fandoms like MrBeast or WWE. The most popular tags are Gaming, Anime, Community, Chill, Roleplay, Social, Fun, Minecraft, and Friendly.
Using Discord for Your Brand: Overview
Discord allows your brand to build and empower your community by focusing on shared interests in addition to brand passion.
Brand-Focused Engagement: Tailoring interactions and content to reinforce brand identity and values within the Discord community, fostering a sense of loyalty and connection among members.
Interest-Focused Engagement: Emphasizing shared interests beyond the brand itself, creating a space where community members can connect over common hobbies or activities.
The platform offers tools that enable your brand advocates to gain access to the exact content they are inspired to discuss or absorb, with special community roles as rewards for participation.
General Discussions
Brand Updates & News
Activation Promotion & Community Involvement
Fan Art
Your community then has opportunities to have stratified discussions in real-time, by voice or text:
Live Discussions:
Watch Parties:
Livestreams:
Using Discord for Your Brand: Brand Features & Marketing Benefits
Discord should be used to a brand's advantage by creating long-lasting relationships vs. one-off engagements through likes and interactions on social platforms.
Discord is a great platform option for brands since there are an infinite number of ways to utilize the platform. A brand can launch anytime, creating always-on conversations and topics for users, or they can use it to promote and start conversations around upcoming events or product releases. The more a brand uses the platform to welcome an audience and reward them with value, the stronger that community will become.
The goal, of course, is once your server grows, there will always be an exchange organically through your brand advocates, so just like a social media platform, it is essential to have a marketing plan on how you plan to gain foot traffic to your server.
Brand Features
Members can join Discord for free–at no cost to you or your audience
Ability to segment like-minded buyers with server channels
Your brand can share pictures/posts and encourage interaction among your customers.
Your server is a central location for all your audience members to stay connected to each other and your brand.
Servers may be upgraded via Nitro, allowing for more enticing engagement like animated “Super Reactions”
Marketing Benefits
Optimize your audience engagement rate
Share industry news and brand updates
Share new products
Answer customers’ questions
Give customers more reasons to share branded content
Host live events to engage with community members
Analytics and Insights
Discord provides server analytics and activity data, offering brands insights into user engagement, trends, and Country and age demographics. The populated data can help brands improve their marketing strategies and better optimize how they connect with their audiences.
Examples of what can be measured include:
Average Visitors
Average Communicators
Average New Members
Average 1 Week Retention %
Invite Statistics
All numbers are plotted against Discord’s benchmark of 30% communicators as a goal. Brands should aim for about 50% of your members visiting, with 50% of those visitors being active communicators of your server.
In addition to server logs, brands can host Q&As and put out polls to further enhance their marketing efforts on Discord.
Conclusion
The power of Discord allows your audience to have a 1:1 relationship with the brand and form relationships with other like-minded and passionate individuals with shared brand affinity. Unlike other social platforms, Discord offers a unique approach for brands to connect and grow their audience by starting and encouraging conversations that stretch far beyond a standard social post.
Super League can help properly position your brand on Discord and leverage the platform to successfully consult on strategy and help launch your channel.
Sources:
Bank my Cell: “Discord Users: How Many People Use Discord?” Aug 2023)
Influencer Marketing Hub June 2023
Movement Strategy: “How Can Brands Use Discord” June 2022
Peer-to-Peer Marketing; “Discord Marketing: How to Use Discord for Insane Growth” 2023
Business of Apps 2023
Influencer Marketing Hub June 2023 “Top 20 Servers”
Workflow 2023 "Discord – Everything You Need to Know"
Discord “Understanding Server Insights”
Discord “341: Understanding Your Community Through Insights”
About Discord | Our Mission and Values
Discord surpasses 500M downloads, as engagement doubles Twitch, TikTok 2022
How Instagram, Discord, and other social media platforms balance teen attention 2023
The Latest Discord Statistics: Servers, Revenue, Data, and More, 2023
Twitch Statistics (2023)
Twitter Digital Insights 2023
Reddit Statistics 2022
Discord Users by Country 2023