Audience VS Community (What's better?)

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This weekend one of my bigger coaching clients got all of his social media accounts hacked.

YouTube gone. Instagram gone. Facebook gone.

He spent YEARS growing his social media audience, had TENS of thousands of followers & subscribers, and now his audience is all gone... 💔

I was gutted when I heard the news (imagine how he felt 😢 ), but it served as a stark reminder for me.

In 2023, if you're a contentpreneur without a free community, your entire business is seriously at risk from:

Hackers
Account bans
Algorithm changes

If any of those things happen, sales can dry up right away.

The solution? A free community - OFF of social media - like on Skool.

@Andrew Kirby

told me the most valuable asset he has is not his YouTube channel with 643k subscribers, but his free Skool community (which at the time had 3k members).

The risk of not having your own free community isn't worth it nowadays - ESPECIALLY when you consider how easy it is to set one up, and how enjoyable it can be to run.

And running a free community doesn't take much time, either.

With just 2 minutes per day you can keep it running smoothly.

And think about 7 benefits of having a free community:

1) You go from 'renting' and audience to 'owning' one. When you own it, nobody can take it away from you.

2) You safeguard a large portion of your audience from hackers, account bans, and algorithm changes.

3) You don't have to rely on the "1-to-many" sales approach (your community members can actually help sell for you).

4) You have a 100% deliverability rate to your prospects (social media typically gives you a 5% delivery rate).

5) You can get away with uploading far less content on social media because people in your community can see what you're doing in the community.

6) You can interact with people on a more personal level, making market research a breeze.

7) You can make sales so much faster (because you're having way more personal conversations).

If my client had focused on growing his free community a year ago (granted, he probably never even knew about free communities), he would have been able to get a large portion of his social media audience into a safe place, and not been in such a dire situation now.

Don't get me wrong, it's still important to post on social media and grow your audience, but you should always be siphoning your social media audience into your free community for all of the above reasons.

How do you do that?

I wrote a post explaining how to grow a free community here.

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