Masterclass - Building An Online Community

Let's explore building an online following

Happy Thursday, y’all! Today’s issue of Backstage Pass will be a bit longer, as I want to do a deep dive into a topic that a lot of people and businesses struggle with: Building a following online.

Let’s start with some definitions.

Audience. This is an audience:

Notice all the chairs are facing toward me. There’s a one to many interaction happening here. When most people say they want to build a community, what they really mean is they want to build an audience. More specifically, they want to build an engaged audience.

Sidenote: The above pic was taken at South By Southwest in 2008, as I was getting set up to moderate a panel that would mark my first time ever speaking in public. That’s right, I decided to make my public speaking debut at the largest conference in the tech/social/interactive space. Plus, it was in Ballroom A, the main stage at SXSW. And I spoke 24 hours after Mark Zuckerberg was on that same stage being interviewed for the first time publicly in the infamous ‘Why is everyone coughing?’ interview by Sarah Lacy. Would I recommend everyone start a public speaking career this way? No, but it worked out in the end!

The main thing you need to remember about an audience is that it’s a one to many interaction, and the one (source) of the information has much of the control over how it is received.

Community. This is a community:

Photo by Julián Gentilezza on Unsplash

These are Color Runners. You can learn more about The Color Run here.

Notice that the focus here isn’t on you, it’s on them. A community is a group of people that have a shared sense of ownership in something bigger than themselves. The Color Runners as a community aren’t interested in you UNLESS you are also a Color Runner, then they are VERY interested in you.

But perhaps the most important thing to understand about a community is how it differs from an audience. With an audience, you have an individual communicating with a group. With a community, you have individuals communicating with each other as a group.

It’s an entirely different value proposition. For the audience, typically the value is in the information being relayed from the individual to the group.

With a community, typically the value is in the connections that members have with each other.

So already, you can see some key differences in the dynamics of an audience versus a community.

An audience is more about controlled messaging. Which has advantages and disadvantages. If you are interacting with an audience, you have far more control over the message being relayed to that audience. But the potential downside is, the audience may not feel compelled to share your message.

With a community, you have far less control over the messaging that happens, because your message is being filtered through the community itself. This requires your participation in that community. Which is a lot more work.

The potential upside is, if you participate in the community you want to reach, you not only increase the chances of that community hearing your message, but that the community will adopt and work to spread your message. Which means your message could reach a dramatically larger audience if a significant portion of a community works together to promote it.

An audience is more of a transactional relationship: The audience understands that you will be giving it something of value. As long as the audience perceives you are delivering value, then all good.

With a community, the value comes from interactions among members, as mentioned earlier. So in order to extract value from a community, you have to participate in that community and contribute value yourself. Think of it as needing to make deposits in a bank account before you can make a withdrawal. You always have to make a deposit first, and cannot withdraw more than you have contributed.

How does building a following differ from building a community?

Let’s say you are blogging and writing a newsletter in the organic gardening space.

If you wanted to build a following in this space, one way to do so could be to identify 10 influencers in the space. These are the influential people in the organic gardening space that others are following on social media. Then you would want to engage with those influencers and their followers as much as possible. Over time, you would likely see your following increase as some of the people that follow these influencers, would eventually start following you as they begin to engage with you on social media.

That’s one way to build a following. How is that different from building a community?

If you wanted to build a community, then you would want to link the people following one influencer to the people following another one. You might comment on Influencer A’s tweet and tell one of her followers that Influencer B just tweeted about that same topic, and share a link to the tweet. Over time, you will find that others will help you in the same way you are helping them, by linking you to content and people that you may find value in.

Regardless of whether you want to build a following or a community, it takes time and a lot of work.

This is the part that most people don’t want to hear when it comes to building a following or community online. It takes work. This isn’t Field of Dreams, it’s not ‘If you build it, they will come’.

There is no such thing as an ‘overnight success’ story online. You know those Notes you keep complaining about on Substack where people are bragging about their subscribers going from 0 to 500 in a month? 99% of the time there’s a detail they are leaving out, like maybe they imported 500 from a list a week ago?

David McIIroy is one of the more successful writers on Substack. He has been writing on Substack for a year, and recently posted an update on his first year on Substack.

After 12 months, David had over 8,100 subscribers across three Substacks. That’s pretty impressive.

But here’s the part that I found fascinating: He had almost no growth for the first 3 months. In months 4 and 5, he saw a marginal increase, but it was still really low.

Starting in month 6, growth took off and has been sharply up ever since. But how many writers like David would have stuck with the writing for the first 5 months, to finally see the breakout starting in the 6th month?

Again, this stuff takes work. It also takes consistent work, applied over time. Whether it’s about building an audience directly, or building a community, you simply must put in the work. It cannot be over stressed, and there are no shortcuts.

You have to put in the work, and you have to do one more thing. We’ll talk about that during the course of introducing you to two of my favorite community builders: Neela and NICKMERCS.

First let’s look at Neela. Neela has a little over 10k followers on LinkedIn. But her engagement is absolutely off the charts. So much so that it’s caused me to rethink how much time I devote to the platform.

An average post on LinkedIn gets around 100-150 Likes and 150-200 comments for Neela. Some get in the 200/250 range.

For reference, I’m not sure I’ve gotten 200 Likes and 250 comments on everything I’ve written on LinkedIn in the last 5 years!

What’s Neela’s secret? Well she’s smart, funny, and a wonderful writer (check out her post on her pet Macaws), that always helps.

But what separates Neela from most others who have larger followings (while struggling to match a fraction of her engagement) is she does two things really well: She cares about other people, and she goes out of her way to engage with others.

That’s it. Were you expecting a cheat code? Sorry, but putting in the work kinda is a cheat code these days. Neela leaves a ton of thoughtful comments on the posts of others on LinkedIn. She highlights people constantly, she connects people to each other. She is a classic community builder; She goes out of her way to help and promote others, and always gives back more than she receives. One of the KPIs that Neela tracks is comments as she believes comments should be higher than reactions, as it signals a deeper level of engagement with the content. That tells you where her priorities are, and it tells you about her behavior on the platform.

Now let’s look at NICKMERCS. Nick has a massive online footprint, including over 2 million followers on Twitter/X and almost 7 million on Twitch.

Ah so completely different scenario than Neela, right? Let’s take a closer look.

First, I can hear the cynic saying ‘Ok Mack, this is ridiculous! This NICKMERCS has millions of followers! Of course he’s gonna have a huge following and community!”

Guess what? Nick started from zero just like the rest of us.

Nick started streaming on Justin.tv in 2010 (Trivia time: Justin.tv was the original URL for what would later become Twitch).

FOUR YEARS LATER, Nick left this tweet in 2014:

It took NICKMERCS 4 years to hit 170 viewers on his Twitch stream.

7 years later in 2021, Nick had his most viewers ever for a single stream: 371,609.

But think about that: It took Nick 4 years to get to 170 viewers. How many of you could get to 170 followers on social media in 4 years on any one platform?

So what is Nick’s secret? How did he make the jump from 170 viewers to 371,609?

Well Nick has several qualities that make for a great content creator on Twitch or another game streaming platform (like Kick). First, he’s an excellent video game player. He has won multiple prestigious video game tournaments on several top titles like Fortnite, Call of Duty and Apex Legends.

And he’s pretty funny. Nick has a great sense of humor and a wonderful sense of what his audience finds interesting and funny.

But like Neela, Nick is a master community builder. Throughout his career, as his following has grown, he has always taken whatever income he has generated from his streaming, and he’s reinvested it back into his community.

First, he’s given his fans an identity: MFAM. MFAM is short for MERCS FAMILY. That alone gives Nick the ability to scale his engagement with the group. It also gives him a way to insert himself into the same group, which also helps that group a way to identify and bond with Nick.

Second, every Christmas, he spends an entire week giving away presents on stream to specially selected MFAM members. Throughout the year, his team watches the chat on Twitch and the interactions on Nick’s social media accounts. They make special note of which members are contributing to the MFAM community, and also make note of what their interests are so they can give them a Christmas gift they will love.

One of my favorite sayings around community-building is “reward the behavior you want to encourage”. Nick wants MFAM members to contribute positively to the larger community. So he and his team make a point to recognize and publicly promote the members who are engaging in the desired behavior. Sure, getting a present from Nick is nice, but for an MFAM member, the public acknowledgement from Nick that he appreciates them is a present as well.

Third, there’s the MFAM Meetups. In 2021 he had an MFAM BBQ in Tampa. Over TEN THOUSAND MFAM members flew to Tampa, just to meet Nick. And Nick spent a cool half a million on the event:

If you think that’s insane, Nick held another MFAM meetup in 2023. This one was in Las Vegas and he spent a MILLION on this one.

More? How about The Joe Joe Fund? Nick created a fund to help MFAM members who have an expensive vet bill, cover the expenses. Nick and his family (currently) have two dogs and two cats, so they are big pet lovers. In 2023, The Joe Joe Fund covered $120,000 worth of vet bills for 80 MFAM members. Come on now!

Plus he’s always engaging with his fans, like this reply he gave me a couple of years ago:

And we will overlook the fact that Nick thinks my name is Mark.

The Common Community-Building Thread Running Through Both Neela and Nick

I wanted to highlight Neela and Nick as excellent examples of community builders to prove to you that size does not matter. Nick has a much bigger following than Neela, but Neela gets monster engagement on social media by using the same tactics that Nick does.

Both of them honestly care about the people that care about them. That’s it. That’s the cheat code.

The best community builders genuinely love the community they are a part of. Neela goes out of her way to support others and put the spotlight on others. So does Nick.

Size does not matter.

What matters is caring, and staying consistent. Look at David’s example from the start of this issue: Very little growth on Substack for 5 months Then starting in the 6th month, growth took off.

It took Nick four long years to get to 170 viewers on one of his streams. Today, he’s one of the richest and most popular streamers on the planet.

So that’s it. If you want to build a community, then you have to roll up your sleeves and get to work. You have to engage with others, you have to promote others, you have to spotlight others.

And eventually, the community will support you back.

So please click all the links above to check out Neela and Nick, I think you can learn a ton about how to build a following and community by watching these two. Trust me, they are both on my short list of people that I study to learn how to better build an engaged community.

Back at it on Monday, y’all. Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

Mack