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When building a consumer brand, audience reach and community depth are both critical—but too often they are confused as being the same thing.
Communicating with your audience describes a one-to-many relationship. It’s primarily broadcast by nature. While social media users can comment, the experience for the majority of your audience is consumption of information. There is huge value in having a broad, receptive audience, and building their experience is absolutely essential—it means that when you have something to say, there will be people to listen.
To attract and retain a truly engaged audience, content should entertain, engage, inspire or educate. No one likes to feel that they are constantly being sold to. This doesn’t mean you can’t share functional information, but it needs to be brought to life in a way that goes beyond the sales pitch. By finding other relevant and relatable topics that a brand can share with its audience, it can hold their attention without every communication being a pure sales message.
But as important as this audience is, it’s not a community. Communities connect over shared interests or values—whether that’s a neighborhood in a small town, a unified religious belief, a shared professional skill or a united love for a football team. Unlike a large audience, members of a community interact with each other. A community represents a many-to-many relationship, a connected group that, in the case of a brand, bonds through a shared passion for that brand and what it stands for. These communities often discover that they have other shared interests, deepening their connections beyond the single topic that originally united them.
The significance of nurturing a true brand community really can’t be understated. While I firmly believe that communities are at their best when given autonomy to grow in a natural direction, there are some things you can do to encourage your community to form and flourish.
Use a platform that facilitates two-way conversations
Not all platforms are created equal when it comes to developing communities. Some platforms like TikTok or Instagram are still very audience-driven, promoting a one-to-many relationship with brands putting out content for their audience to primarily view, like, share or (if they’re lucky) comment on. These platforms are important, and the engagement you see can has a real impact on awareness and sales, but they don’t intrinsically empower people to engage with each other.