Audience vs. Community: What's the Difference for Your Brand?

Community is more than just a feeling of belonging. In the context of business, it’s a structure for creating value. A simple way to understand it is to compare “community” to an “audience.”

Easier said than done, community members are often confused with followers, users, subscribers, and customers. While the latter are passive and transient, the former are passionately engaged in a give-and-take with the brand and other members of the community.

What does “community” mean? Facebook calls its billions of users a community, and multinational brands use this word to refer to their customers. Are these communities in any meaningful sense? What about the “brand communities” I mentioned earlier, do these qualify? And can a community that is paid truly be called a community at all? As paid commun... See more

Moving from audiences to communities. Memberships and subscriptions hold the promise of closing the gap between media brands and their audiences. When your audience is your customer, you tend to provide better services. The advent of tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations would seem to represent the next step. It is logical for a communi... See more

Within such virtual spaces, “community” is a shorthand for interaction — not necessarily belonging. From a business standpoint, community is a means to harness customer loyalty.

Communities naturally drum up hype for a brand and its products; in some instances, members might even provide feedback for product development and are the first to test new... See more

Stop calling your Instagram audience a community Audience ≠ community How to think about audience vs community:

Increasingly, building a successful startup involves not only building a product that people can’t get enough of, but also building an engaged, loyal community around that product.

The people who interact with your product generally fall into one of four buckets: Customers/users buy and/or use your product. Evangelists tell everyone they know to buy... See more

The internet stage is more crowded. Attention is more expensive. Making one's voice heard has gotten harder. The good days of cheap Facebook ads are behind us. Turning users into contributors and advocates is a hard-to-crack but high-rewards marketing strategy. Community is the new Moat.