Why are Communities important?
Communities are the groups of users and customers supporting an individual, a brand or a company, but how are communities any useful?
Before answering why communities are important, I will need to give some context first on the biggest natural communities that exist; ecosystems.
An ecosystem can be said to be a single environment where creation, growth, and translation occurs in a self-sustaining way to create and enable life (eco) as a result of the different actors and parts within it (the system).
The translation in the definition above is the “death” part of the ecosystem, where the life that has been created is said to die. But we know Matter (Mass or Energy) can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another, so nothing really dies in an ecosystem, it just changes or “translates”. This applies here if you look at the actors and parts within the ecosystem as either matter, mass or forms of energy.
The world as we know it is an ecosystem, and in business, big companies also have these ecosystems around them. From Apple to Google to Meta, they each have their own ecosystems. Their ecosystems are what enables them to keep growing and creating and growing as quickly as they are.
What if any other business could build their own ecosystem to help them scale and grow as well as the big companies have? This is where communities come in. Communities (the customers, the users, the followers) are the life (eco) that empower the business (system) to create their ecosystem.
Every individual, brand or company already has a community, it is recognising this community that you can start to build your ecosystem.