Community Driven Content
I would encourage you, please involve your audience in what you are creating. I'm going to give you an immediate example of this actually that happened literally last night. We're here filming this content and an individual who is here that works at this studio, he also makes music. And we were talking about just different ways to involve and get more engagement from his audience.
And one of the things that we were talking about is a lot of musicians, they have, you know, multiple different versions of a verse for a track, as an example, that they're working on. Or they might have a guitar lick that they're working on, and they have a couple of different ideas or versions that they're working on. This applies, by the way, to like filmmakers, to authors, like literally any medium that you're making.
And I told him, well, a very simple way to engage your audience and to get them to feel very bought in to this single or an album, but let's call it a single for now that you're releasing is to upload maybe to your Instagram or whatever platform you prefer, the two different options. So, let's say you have two different versions of a verse that you're going to run in a track that you're releasing. You upload both of them and you allow your audience to tell you which one they like the most.
Guess what? They're going to be fucking invested. How cool, right? And if you're an author, you can do the same thing. You might have two different versions of a chapter. Sure. You might have two different versions of the title of the book. There's so many different things that you can do here.
The Magic of Involvement
But if you involve your audience, one, you're making content or you're making something that you know they're going to want because they have told you they want it. But also, they are so much more bought in. They're going to be your advocates. They're going to go out and be your missionaries telling other people about what you produced because they were part of the process.
The mindset shift here is shifting from creator first to community first. If you make everything about them and serving them and bringing them into your world, bringing them into your content creation, it's a totally different ballgame. It's no longer just a one-way talking at them. It's talking with them.
Create Feedback Loops
Okay, here's what you need to do. Listen and adapt. Listen and iterate. The best content ideas don't come from you sitting in your room asking yourself "what should I make next?" They don't come from posting polls asking "what should I make next?" The best content ideas come from your audience. But not from asking them directly.
You need to pay attention to your DMs. You need to pay attention to your comments. You need to pay attention to what people are actually asking you about.
Here's Gary's approach to this, and I think it's brilliant. Gary spends an incredible amount of time doing social listening. He's looking at tweet replies, he's looking at Instagram DMs, he's looking at comments. And when he notices that five people have asked him the same question, he immediately creates content around that.
And then people respond with "How did you know I needed this, Gary?" Because he's listening. He's not guessing. He's not creating content in a vacuum. He's literally responding to what his community is telling him they need.
That's the feedback loop. Listen, create, share, repeat.
Make Your Audience the Hero
This is huge. Stop making yourself the hero of every story. Make your audience the hero.
Share community wins. Share transformations. Share case studies. I do weekly Zoom calls where I share success stories publicly. When someone gets a win in my community, I'll get a DM about it and I turn that into content.
I'll hop on Instagram and do video calls with successful community members. Make them the star. People want to see themselves in your content, not just see you.
When someone in your community has a transformation or gets a result, that becomes your most powerful content. Because other people in your community can see themselves in that story. They think "if they can do it, I can do it too."
Leverage User-Generated Content (UGC)
This is where it gets really fun. Encourage your audience to create with you. Put out prompts. Ask them to stitch your content, to duet your content, to respond to your content with their own take.
And then when they do, you amplify it. You share it. You comment on it. You create this perpetual cycle of engagement where they create, you amplify, more people create, you amplify more.
Your audience doesn't need to be huge for this to work. I've seen creators with 300 followers create incredible engagement because they're actually engaging with every single person who interacts with their content.
The Three Pillars of Community Content
There are three types of content you need to be making:
Educational Content - This is teaching, solving problems, helping people get results. This is the foundation. People follow you because you help them.
Conversational Content - This is engaging your audience, making them feel heard. Ask them questions. Start debates. Share controversial takes. Make them part of the conversation.
Social Proof Content - This is showcasing wins, sharing real stories from your community. This isn't you talking about how great you are. This is your community talking about their own transformations.
Turn Viewers Into Community Members
Make engagement the goal, not views. Stop obsessing over view counts and start obsessing over engagement.
Ask for the fire emoji. Ask them to debate something in the comments. Share controversial takes that get people talking. And then - this is the most important part - respond to them.
The biggest issue I see with creators who complain about low engagement is they're not responding to the engagement they're already getting. If someone takes the time to comment on your content and you don't respond, why would they comment again?
Reward participation with attention. When someone engages, engage back. When someone shares their story, amplify it. When someone asks a question, answer it.
Inside Jokes and Shared Language
Strong communities have their own language. They have inside jokes. They have shared references that outsiders don't understand.
Look at gym bros talking about "bulking season." Look at the Harley community and all their jokes about sportsters. These communities have developed their own culture and language.
You can either leverage existing inside jokes from your industry or niche, or you can create your own. But the key is consistency. Use the same phrases, the same references, the same terminology until it becomes part of your community's identity.
When your audience starts using your language in their own content, when they start making the same jokes, when they start referencing the same things - that's when you know you've built a real community.
Chapter Summary: Building Your Brand Army
Community-driven content isn't just about engagement—it's about transforming passive audiences into active brand advocates who voluntarily contribute to your success.
The content creators who master community building:
- Understand participation psychology to create genuine involvement opportunities
- Implement systematic feedback loops that make community members feel heard and valued
- Showcase community success to inspire action and build social proof
- Develop cultural elements that create belonging and insider identification
- Respond consistently to participation attempts, rewarding engagement with attention
Your community becomes your competitive moat—it's the one asset competitors cannot replicate or acquire.
The professionals who build lasting brands understand that in an attention economy, the deepest relationships win. They create communities where members don't just consume content—they contribute to it, improve it, and advocate for it because they feel genuine ownership in its success.
"Individual commitment to a group effort — that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work." - Vince Lombardi
The goal isn't building an audience—it's building a community that builds itself.