Community audience building will effectively bring an audience to your business and create a loyal community.

In digital work, it is essential to understand what a community is and what an audience is, how two are different, and how they can be integrated. There is enough room in an audience to form a community. The audience is the target set of people you want to see your content. The community is your loyal consumers who are engaging with you.

On my hiking website, my audience is people who are into hiking in a specific area that I create content about. The community is people I’ve developed into fans and followers of my brand from social media.

Now that we understand audiences and communities let’s look at a few ways to conduct community audience building to combine the two.

1. Community Audience Building with Social Media

Social media will be one of the best ways to turn an audience into a community.

Not everyone wants to use social media. It is understandable. Social media often poison our minds, especially now with all the political and socially controversial debates and division. But social media is often where your audience and community can be established. Just focus on the networks where your audience is and consumes and emphasize the features of the network being consumed the most.

I always start with just a few of the most popular social platforms. Once I establish a community on them, I’ll look into using another social platform. Don’t overwhelm yourself with too many social channels at once.

Nowadays, you can quickly connect with your audience on social media faster than anywhere else. Because of the built-in community feature on social media, community audience building will be a lot easier.

2. Community Audience Building by Putting Them First

The best community audience building is when you put the audience first.

Thanks to the internet, this is a different world we live in. It is a “me” society. Everyone wants to be the center of attention. And when you feed to their attention, you’ll be more likable in their world. So, it is essential to put your audience first when trying to develop a community. Put their needs before your own needs. That is how you will convert them from consumers into customers. They need to feel like whatever you’re selling will benefit their needs.

One engagement strategy I use on my audience for community development is asking questions. I ask questions daily that enable my audience to tell me about themselves, their needs, and what they like the best.

Getting people to engage as a community can be challenging. Still, if you get them to engage by talking about themselves, that task will be much easier because we love to talk about ourselves in this society.

3. Community Audience Building with Useful Content

You can build a loyal community by creating the most helpful content possible and giving it away.

You should always give more away than you sell regarding community audience building. Giving away content and tools will build trust and loyalty quicker than trying to sell them to people. Give away information and sell the benefits of that information. You’ll not only develop a community for your brand, but you’ll also develop your authority in your niche.

I look for the most complex challenges in the niche where I create content. I then try to solve the challenge using different methods. I make an easy timeline to complete the challenge and turn that into the content.

Your audience wants answers; if you give them that, building a community from that will be very simple.

Community audience building can be achieved with minimal effort. You have to practice the methods above and work on being skilled at practicing them. I use these methods every day that I create, and they have always helped me. Now it is time for you to try these methods with your audience and start building a community today.

About the Author

Shawn Gossman has created content, blogged, ran online communities, and shared a passion for digital marketing for over twenty years. Shawn believes the best way to help content creators, businesses, brands, and marketers is to give away more than you sell. The same advice is recommended for the readers that follow this blog. Shawn also offers a variety of services for extra help in the area of content creation, blogging, forums, and digital marketing. Learn more about Shawn Gossman by clicking here.