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Audience or Community: Which Do You Have?
Read time: 5 min
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Building a community is very different than building an audience.
Businesses and creators often talk about their “community”, but the reality is they usually have an engaged audience, not the former.
Don’t get me wrong, audiences are important and challenging to grow. But they shouldn’t be confused with a community.
Think of it like this: having an audience is like running a TV station.
They sit in front of the television wanting to be entertained. It's one-way communication – you’re simply curating and passing information along to them, but nothing comes back and there is zero cross-pollination between viewers.
There’s obvious value in having your market’s attention, but it’s limited in that once you stop “broadcasting” there’s no longer engagement.
Having a community, however, means interaction and content persists beyond your direct involvement. This allows your brand to grow organically, builds trust among your members, and fosters inclusivity so people are excited to become brand ambassadors.
Plus, the global Digital Online Community market is projected to reach $41.8B by 2029 [for you metric-driven readers]. This is a huge opportunity to expand your business’ revenue by making some simple changes.
But how do you know if you have an audience or a community?
In this article, I’ll break down the five necessary elements of a community using the T.R.I.B.E. acronym.
Togetherness
This refers to having a digital or physical space where the members of your community can interact with one another.
There are a variety of digital platforms you can build your community on such as Slack, Discord, or Circle – the latter being where we host the Vet Collective.
Circle has been incredibly helpful because it lets us stream live events, host webinars off platform, archive recorded videos, incorporate digital courses, and have chat forums for our members to interact.
Every one of these is more value being delivered to our members and it puts them all on one platform so people aren’t having to jump around to find things.
Rituals
These are regularly occurring events where members are educated, entertained, or otherwise engaged.
This is important because it builds predictability and routine into the value proposition of your community. When members know there are daily, weekly, or monthly events, they’ll be more likely to attend.
The Vet Collective has hosted monthly entrepreneurship webinars where we bring on industry experts such as corporate attorneys, business & franchise brokers, and financial lenders to provide resources for and information on running a business.
Live community attendance is where you’ll develop your community’s culture and foster member-to-member interaction. This is truly what separates audiences from communities.
Identity
You want your members to publicly identify as supporters of your community.
Just like service members boast about their branch of the military or sports fans proudly claim their team, you want your members to become ambassadors of your brand.
Members making posts on LinkedIn about your recent event, wearing community swag, or recruiting friends are all great indicators. You can also incentivize these actions by setting up a referral program to compensate people who grow your membership.
People want to feel valued and to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Designing your community to offer these will go a long way.
Belonging
This aspect is tough to gauge unless you have direct interaction with your members, which is why feedback loops are so important.
You need to find out if they feel included, if they felt welcomed when they joined, and if they feel safe in sharing their thoughts.
The last item is critical for the Vet Collective.
Veterans who served over the past 20+ years have experienced trauma, pain, loss, and struggle, which by many has been compartmentalized and hidden away. By creating a space in which our members feel confident in sharing their feelings, it has allowed many of them to open-up on topics beyond just entrepreneurship.
Running a successful business is just as much about being in a good head space as it is about making sound business decisions. We recognize this and have made it a pillar of our community.
Engagement
This last factor is where you’ll truly make your money.
Does your community run without you (the creator) posting, commenting, and moderating?
Having active participation and member contribution is what drives your community forward. If you need to be logged-in for hours every day, prodding people to interact with one another, then you have an audience and very little scalability.
If your members are creating relationships with one another and having conversations on and off the platform, then you’re going to see exponential growth because you’re generating actual value in people’s lives.
The goal is to create something that doesn’t require your presence. There’s a reason you don’t see Mark Zuckerberg or Tom Anderson (remember him from MySpace?) needing to interact with people on their platforms.
Conclusion
Although the difference between an audience and a community is subtle, the growth your brand will experience when it has an actual community cannot be understated.
Measuring your community by its Togetherness, Rituals, Identity, Belonging, and Engagement will not only give you tangible metrics to track, but also a clear path to creating significant revenue.
Your members will quickly become your best marketing asset, giving you a huge boost in sales while earning money instead of spending it.
Even if you only have an audience, you can convert a portion of them to your community through rituals and habits like in-person events, Live Q&As, and recorded webinars.
By showing your audience there is significant value in being members (free or charged), you’ll be able to attract the dedicated ones and create your core initial group.
If you’re interested in starting a community but don’t know where to begin, simply reply and we can help you build your roadmap.
This week's Harder Not Smarter Podcast episode:
EP 017 w/ Denny Gerardi - In this episode, we interview Denny Girardi, a former Army Infantry Team leader and co-host of the Be The Standard podcast. The conversation covers topics such as podcast production, breaking the stigma around mental health, the goals of creating a podcast, the importance of consistency, and the impact of exercise and cutting back on alcohol for mental health. Denny does not disappoint. Give this episode a listen and check out his podcast for more inspirational content.
Whenever you're ready there are a few ways we can help:
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