Discord was launched in 2015 as a messaging and calling app for gamers. At that time, Skype was still commonly used for video conferencing and young gamers who wanted to communicate over their entertainment. The new platform improved significantly on predecessors, with better voice recognition and call quality.
Nowadays, Discord has evolved into a thriving social media platform. Monthly users grew from 250 million in 2019 to 350 million in 2021.
According to Hubspot, Discord is amongst the top new social platforms to watch out for in 2022. Discord is no longer just for gamers. The platform hosts communities for hobbies like language learning, art, business, history and more. Some brands are already using Discord servers to build communities, and many creators on YouTube engage their young audience via this platform.
This article examines how Discord can be used to gain youth insights into your brand.
About Discord’s Demographics
Discord has favourable demographics for anyone interested in Gen Z insights. Its audience comprises primarily Millenials and Gen Z, who use the platform for various purposes.
There are more than 19 million active servers on Discord, and 4 billion minutes are spent on conversations on these servers.
Discord initially didn’t gear its services toward young audiences. Its aim was targeted at 30-33-year-old users. However, based on users’ experiences, the average age was around 20 years old, and in recent years has fallen to about 16.
Gen Z, in particular, uses Discord for school, where a server for their year group enables them to stay connected and share study materials. The app also serves for general text messaging and voice and video calls. This makes it a popular option for young people that want to hang out online in any context. Audiences flock towards Discord for music and gaming communities, as well as for Dungeons and Dragons and other roleplaying groups that are quickly gaining popularity in media.
Some have described the chatting platform as “Slack for Gen Z”.
Discord As An Insights Platform
Businesses and creators are increasingly picking up on the potential offered by Discord’s core features. For Brands, the platform presents an excellent way to engage audiences in conversation, surveys and little server games. In addition, it offers several features that lend it to the purposes of an insights platform:
- Discord allows you to create free servers with up to 250,000 members. In these servers, you can create several channels for dedicated topics. You can pin important messages and add channel descriptions to keep things organised. Users can share images, videos, links, audio files and documents alongside their text messages, and you can have several dedicated voice channels for live conversations.
- Discord gives you control over user permissions. You can assign roles to reward VIP users and give them more server rights. This is how you create moderators for your server. Still, you can also use it to provide users access to dedicated VIP channels that others can’t see.
- You can use Bots for games and functions. Discord’s functionality can be extended with discord bots. These can, for example, “level” users up when they prove to be active in chat. This is an easy way to see at a glance who your most active community members are and focus your attention on them.
- You can use Discord for advertising your new content to your most engaged audience. Just create a channel that notifies every server member when you post and use it to link to your latest content.
- You can host live events like game nights, celebrity interviews, behind-the-scene insights and more. Discord allows you to host group video calls or share your screen.
With these building blocks at your fingertips, it’s easy to use Discord to grow your community and start discussions relevant to your business. For example, you could have a server to discuss new product ideas and get your community’s input. You can post polls and garner reactions and assign moderators to look over discussions surrounding your ideas.
Following these discussions and keeping notes of the sentiments expressed, you can quickly get qualitative Gen Z insights.
Discord is also an excellent way to curate your audience and find your most loyal customers. Whereas everyone can see your Tweets, for example, you can invite highly engaged audience members into your Discord channel to provide behind-the-scenes insights and engage them in direct conversation.
Is Discord a Replacement for Traditional Insight Platforms?
With the features listed above, Discord has the potential to help brands gain insight into their audience. In addition, it’s a great way to grow a community and engage your young audience members, rewarding your best customers and encouraging them to invite more members.
However, Discord is still no replacement for an insights platform. To gain meaningful youth insights, you will need access to trained researchers who can moderate the content and collect sentiments for analysis. Unfortunately, with limited search functions and very few analytics, Discord doesn’t give you the necessary insights.
If you like the idea of having your own community of young consumers to engage in discussions, we recommend getting in touch with us at This Is Selfhood. We are an insights platform with a thriving community of U-30 consumers focusing on Gen Z insights for brands.
