Are you building an audience or a community?
Are you building a Community or audience?
As a business owner operating in a world where everything is considered “community,” you may be confused about exactly what yours means. Building a community isn’t the same as making an audience. I often say that you must create an audience before forming a community. The critical difference is that you send messages to your audience, but a community talks to each other.
Audience versus community
Audience: People who follow our buy from a business communicate with them through one-directional messages.
Community: A group of people who can communicate with each other.
To build an audience, you create content that gets pushed to your customers or followers. You could use an email list, host a podcast, or run a YouTube channel. Either way, this is a one-directional communication. What it isn’t is a community. Instead, a community is an intentional group meeting for a specific purpose.
Another point I want to make is that social media is not a community. Social media allows people to create and share content, but it’s not the same as the community I help my clients build. Social media is often designed to serve a platform or business’s needs, but a community allows members to meet them. When constructed and maintained intentionally, communities create calm. Consider the last time you logged into Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. If you’re anything like me, the experience usually brings distraction or comparison – but not calm.
According to Hivebrite, a community software, social media isn’t ideal for community building. They say communities built on social media provide fewer distractions and less spam. When you choose a place to run your community dedicated to your sole purpose, it “facilitates authentic self-expression and a feeling of belonging. Members are more likely to reach out to share ideas, opinions, and best practices, ask and answer questions, and take action.”
Another reason to avoid building a community on common social media platforms is that you need more control over the experience. When Facebook and Instagram went down for several hours in October of 2021, some business owners received a gut punch.
“While the IG outage was mildly stressful, it did reaffirm some of the concerns… namely, that IG rarely rewards us for the time we invest and that relying on a 3rd party to mediate our relationships with customers is risky business,” said Rachel Jones, founder Jonesey.
Of course, all online communities rely on tech to work effectively. But my point is that social media can remove, delete, copy, or take ownership of any content created on their platform. Please consider hosting a community other than social media.
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