5 community-building tips I’ve learned from working in social media, TV, and nonprofits

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For the past ten years, I’ve lived and breathed marketing. I’ve run social campaigns, worked with influencers, created content, built affiliate programs, and everything in between. One factor unites everything: Every single winning strategy has always tied back to community.

And more often than not, when an initiative flops, it’s because that community is missing. When brands fail to engage, there’s a sense that they’re just pushing content onto their audience, rather than bringing people into a conversation and engaging with them.

Community has always been critical. But in 2025, it matters more than ever. That’s why I wrote this post. Below, I’ll share common mistakes to avoid and my personal tried-and-tested tips for building lasting, authentic communities.

Why Community Matters More than Ever in 2025

In the past, marketers talked a lot about identifying a target audience. We’d come up with a product and tell our target audience to buy it. The exchange ended there, without any deep, human-centered connection.

That’s all changing. If your brand is just telling people to buy a product, you’re falling behind. When you sound sales-y, potential customers tune out. They don’t feel heard. There’s no engagement, and they don’t feel like they’re a part of anything. The solution is community.

Instead of “Hey, look at this” or “Hey, I need you to buy this,” a community-focused campaign starts by actually talking to people and understanding their needs. Now, top brands work backward, starting from customers’ needs and then building products based on real, human input.

It’s not a cookie-cutter approach. The process involves both knowing what existing communities to serve and building communities around new products. Teams have to invest time exploring why existing solutions don’t work. Then, they can develop effective solutions hand-in-hand with a community.

Over the last ten years of my career in nonprofits, TV, and social media, I’ve found that investment leads to loyalty. I’ve learned to make community the center of all my campaigns, so customers become a part of our brand story.

What does this look like in practice? One of my favorite campaigns involved marketing a cosmetic eye mask for Topicals as their Director of Social Media. Before launch, we sent the product to real customers for testing. We connected with participants in group chats to see what they thought. We even organized an in-person hike, invited everyone to wear the eye masks, and listened to what they thought.

My team’s focus wasn’t just on collecting product feedback. We weren’t trying to bank content from this awesome group of 40 women, all wearing eye masks and walking around Long Beach. We wanted to build a two-way relationship with our customers.

That’s what community-based marketing is all about. Building a real community decenters the product and instead focuses on the people who are the heart of any brand.