Why Brands Should Add Discord to Their Social Media Toolkit
Why Brands Should Add Discord to Their Social Media Toolkit
Brands already have a lot of social media platforms on their plate. Managing Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook channels all require different strategies and styles, keeping social media managers busy day and night.
Yet, even with their plate already full, it is time to add Discord to their social media menu.
Discord began as a chat platform for friends to use while gaming together but has evolved into a place where relationships are not merely enabled, they are also formed, building entire communities around shared interests.
Adept marketers are already finding ways to build these communities around their brands, giving them a direct connection to their most passionate fans and promoters; other brands should follow suit.
Let’s talk about how to use Discord for marketing.
Discord is the Right Platform at the Right Time
Discord is built around servers—collections of persistent chat rooms, and live voice and video channels—that users access via an invite link. Once a user is a member of a particular server, its manager directly broadcasts content and communicates with them, as users in the same server also interact with one another.
But let’s rewind a bit.
Discord debuted in May 2015 as a platform for gamers to communicate, addressing a long-rampant shortcoming within in-game voice chats. Starting in March of 2020, however, it began pushing beyond the gaming community to focus on community writ large. Thus, the rebranded motto, which changed from the classic “Chat for Gamers” to the updated “Chat for Communities and Friends,” and new slogan, “Your place to talk.”
This transition, which is key to Discord’s marketing potential, coincided with the earliest days of the pandemic lockdown, when social apps began to fill a necessary gap in interpersonal communication. Like Zoom, Discord skyrocketed during the pandemic (parents migrated to Zoom, their children to Discord), going from 59 million active users in 2019 to today’s 150 million.
But we should not think of Discord’s rise as merely a byproduct of the pandemic. It also fits into a broader cultural shift away from the wide-open broadcast version of social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) to smaller, private, and more intimate spaces. Some of this transition was generational, some of it a response to repeated privacy concerns around traditional social media. Regardless, with its focus on private, niche community interaction, Discord is the right platform for our moment.
Not Your Traditional Social Media: The Difference Between Timelines and Servers
That distinction between Discord and traditional open platform social media also goes a long way in explaining why brands should add Discord to their social media repertoire.
On Discord, the dynamic between brand and user is entirely different from any other major social media platform because, on Discord, everybody in the server wants to be there. It’s not like Twitter, where you can be minding your own business and a friend of a friend of a friend reposts something that annoyingly finds its way onto your timeline.
On traditional social media, brands typically have to be the loudest voice in the room to get noticed, even by their followers who still see their posts in a steady stream of other content. On Discord, brands don’t have to be the loudest voice in the room because they have created their own room.
Brands on Discord are not chasing communities and hunting down engagement, they are giving communities reasons to form around them and interacting with them when they do.
If Discord is the Wild West of Social Media, Brands Should Look to be Pioneers
Yet, major brands have yet to capitalize on Discord, seeing it as the Wild West of social media, an emerging tool where best practices have yet to develop. Yes, servers can be verified on Discord just like accounts can be verified on other social media, but some marketers still think it is too small and too niche to rationalize any investment.
But, like the Wild West, Discord definitely has its pioneers.
For example, the independent gaming studio Annapurna Interactive built a server for their games, with each getting its own channel. There, it previews forthcoming games among the brand’s most devoted fans, creates a space for users to discuss all aspects of their games, and serves up exclusive promotions.
The Annapurna Interactive server has become a hub for the brand’s devotees, exposing players of one game to the company’s entire stable, while also becoming its single greatest hype machine.
Similarly, Lemonade recently helped Iskra, a Web3 gaming company, build out its own branded Discord server. This included individual channels, a funnel for first time users to integrate them to the server, and the digital infrastructure to manage it.
Companies looking to rapidly mount a Discord presence must consider marketing agencies and their ability to efficiently and expertly help build out a brand’s digital identity and presence.
With Iskra, Lemonade handed off server management to the company’s internal marketing team, who were quickly able to turn this infrastructure into a thriving community built around the future of play.
When it comes to day-to-day server management, free-to-download and simple-to-install Discord bots can be set to perform any number of tasks, including:
Welcoming new members and directing them where to go
Moderating discussions in text channels
Banning bullies and other trouble makers
Engaging with users through automated questions of the day
Alerting a server or channel when starting a livestream on Twitch
Operating a support ticket system
Discord bots also provide invaluable backend resources for community managers, sifting through reams of user data to offer insights into engagement patterns across the entire server down to a granular level.
With marketing agencies like Lemonade able to rapidly and effectively develop a server, and bots enabling some of the day-to-day management and analytics, it is easier for brands to build out their Discord presence than they likely realize.
While Discord is only now coming into its own, brands cannot afford to ignore the pathways it opens to their most ardent fans. It allows them to build an umbrella under which users, ranging from devoted promoters to first time customers, share their enthusiasm amongst themselves while eagerly receiving the branded content.
For experienced marketers, it may feel unfamiliar or niche, and it may even be a bit intimidating. But social media is evolving and if marketers don’t evolve along with it, well, some discord will soon develop.