What Is Discord? A Beginner's Guide

Jul 21

Community is the ultimate buzzword for social media marketers in 2021. With more and more people spending longer online and on social media, including an entire generation of digital natives and a new working-from-home culture, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that online communities have become an integral part of users’ online experience.

But it’s not just the major social media platforms leading the way when it comes to communities. Enter: Discord, the group chatting platform with community at its heart.

With 140 million monthly active users, a number which has more than doubled since 2019, Discord is becoming an increasingly important hub for creators, brands and users alike. Originally created for gamers in 2015, Discord has since been adopted by many kinds of communities as a space to connect, chat, share resources, go live, and more.

*Discord’s monthly active users increased from 56 million in 2019 to 140 million in 2021.*

How does Discord work?

Discord is divided into community groups known as servers. Each server has its own members, topics, rules and channels. There are now around 6.7 million active servers on the platform, all centred around particular topics, games and hobbies that its members are interested in.

And that’s one of Discord’s biggest strengths: the majority of its servers are private, invite-only spaces made up of users who share the same interests and actively want to participate in them.

There's no algorithm deciding what they should see, no endless scrolling, and no news feed. Conversations on Discord are driven by shared interests.

There are also some larger, more open communities on the platform, the largest of which are based around popular games: Fornite remains Discord’s most popular server with 571,000 members, closely followed by Minecraft’s 569,000-strong server.

What can you do on Discord?

Chat

In many ways, Discord has been ahead of the trend for years (Clubhouse who?). The platform allows voice and video chat within its servers, as well as livestream gaming and screen sharing from PC.

Servers are made up of 2 types of channels: text channels and voice channels.

Text channels

Text channels are spaces where server members can talk to one another via text. Within one server, you can create multiple separate text channels for all of the individual topics your community talks about.

*Text channels are located in the top left-hand corner of Discord on desktop and signalled by hashtags.*

Voice channels

Voice channels are spaces where members can voice and video chat with one another. It’s more like a ‘Room’ than a phone call - you simply click on the voice channel to enter it and this will let other members see you’re in there, allowing them to join the channel to talk with all the other members in the chat.

Voice channels are located on the left-hand side of Discord on desktop. You can see a list of members that are currently in which voice channels. If a member is live, this is signalled with a red Live button.

Connect to other apps

Discord can be connected to other apps, most commonly YouTube, Twitch and Spotify. Discord can also be used on both desktop and mobile, meaning you can use it on any device, even while streaming on another device. This is just one feature that makes it an ideal community platform for gamers, YouTubers, and other creators.

Go live

Discord also offers live-streaming capabilities. Within voice channels, you can click on the Go Live button and select a game to start streaming. You can also share your screen or show a specific app in real-time using Go Live. While screen sharing on Discord, you can continue to chat on text and voice channels - handy if you’re working on something with co-workers, sharing gameplay for a video game you’re playing, and more.

Create bespoke emojis

As well as offering a wider, more expressive range of animated emojis to all users, every Discord server has its own individual library of emojis for its members. You can turn any image into a custom emoji and upload it to your server’s library, allowing anyone on the server to use it. This is yet another feature of the platform that makes it ideal for creators and brands, allowing them to build niche and loyal communities in a fun and engaging way.

*Some of the most popular animated emojis used on Discord, including catjam (a cat bobbing its head funkily) and cool-doge (a cool looking dog with sunglasses on).*

Control who you interact with

Though more similar to a forum than a traditional social media platform, Discord does include all of the social media-style features that allow you to control who you interact with. Within a server, you can right-click on any member’s name and see options including sending them a private message and adding them to your friends list, as well as muting or blocking them. Admins also have the power to ban members from their servers outright, as well as deafen members so they can’t hear anything from other members of the server.

Regulate your community

Discord Bots allow you to automate tasks such as welcoming new users, filtering out spam, banning users who break server rules, and more. To add a bot on Discord you need to find one online and then invite it to your server. The most popular websites for finding Discord bots are Discord Bots, top.gg, and Bots on Discord. If you’re a techie and know your way around applications like Node, you also have the option to create your own custom bots and add them to Discord’s Development Portal.

Key points

Discord is a forum-style, group chatting platform with community at its heart.
The platform has boomed in popularity in recent years and is now home to 140 million monthly active users.
Discord is split into community platforms known as servers, each of which has its own members, topics, rules and channels.
Servers can offer multiple text channels, which allow members to chat via text, and voice channels, which allow members to voice and video chat as well as go live and share their screen.
Discord has many features that make it ideal for creators, including the ability to connect other platforms like Twitch and YouTube and create bespoke emojis for its server library.