Beyond Big Social: How Creators Can Build Community in Niche Spaces

Social media’s newest star, TikTok, currently boasts over 1.12 billion active users each month. While this big audience means you can connect with millions of people, it also means that you have to compete against millions of people to get your content seen by the masses.

With high-quality content and consistency, you can grow a fan base on big social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and X but building community in niche spaces can mean easier access to your ideal audience, no more testy algorithms and getting complete control over your content, your data and your relationship with your fans.

Niche spaces like Substack, Patreon, Discord and Reddit all offer more private community offerings. You can also create your own communities by building a personal website, blog, forum or newsletter or by using community platforms like Mighty Networks, Circle and Skool.

If you have something to share about your life, business, hobbies or values that you think has community-building potential, learning about these alternatives to big social media platforms might be the first step to building your own personalized corner of the internet.

The Benefits of Building a Community

Some creators post on social media because they enjoy sharing their lives with the world or are passionate about video production or photography. Others go online to spread the word about their business or side hustle. You might be curious about building a community online because you just like windsurfing and want to interact with other like-minded windsurfers.

No matter the reason why you’re curious about building community in niche spaces, there are a lot of benefits to bringing together people with similar interests. First, the internet is a great place to network and make friends. While you might not always encounter the kindest people and should be aware of internet safety, social media can still be a place to build some quality new relationships.

Building community can also be a powerful tool for your business or just your personal success. If you’ve ever read Kevin Kelly’s famous essay “1,000 True Fans,” you might already be familiar with Kelly’s idea that you don’t need to be a huge star to experience success. He argues that you only need 1,000 true fans to survive as a creator.

He believes that by going after a smaller group of genuine fans who really appreciate you, you’ll end up finding success more quickly. Instead of aiming to be in a blockbuster film, you might try building a small community around improv in Atlanta where you’d share your tips, offer one-on-one coaching sessions or perform for your community of one thousand fans in some of your favorite theaters.

If you can get your 1,000 true fans to spend one hundred dollars on you each year, that is already $100,000 in your pocket. Even if you don’t currently have a service or product to offer to your community, it’s better to build your community now so that you already have a group of potential customers ready when you do have something you’d like to sell.

Monetizing Your Community

Creators can rely on both big social and smaller niche communities financially if they understand how to monetize in the right ways. In 2019, creator Arianna Renee failed to sell 36 t-shirts from a fashion brand she was launching to her two million-person Instagram following.

She was able to create a large fan base around her photos, but since she didn’t build her community around fashion and that specific t-shirt style, she couldn’t sell to even a small fraction of her followers. If you plan to monetize your audience, you need to be sure that your current community will be interested in what you would like to sell.

If you want to be a travel vlogger, you might offer paid guides, travel consulting or video and photography services to hotels and tourism offices. If you want to share videos of the clothes you crochet, you could sell patterns or your final pieces to your community members.

Some creators make money solely from their video views and ads, but it’s always best to have multiple income streams in case you can no longer depend on one income option.

Why a Niche Space Might be Best for Your Community

As Kevin Kelly shared, aiming for a smaller, high-quality community means more opportunity for deeper and more genuine connections, a more manageable fanbase and an increased likelihood for monetization.

You might also like working in niche spaces if you prefer one-on-one connections over talking to the masses, have struggled to find success on big social networks or want more ownership over your content and your audience.

When posting on big social networks, you’ll be heavily reliant on their algorithms and policies, which can change without warning and affect your visibility and income. You’ll also have less ownership over your content and your audience’s data so you won’t be able to connect with them as easily.

If you grow 100,000 followers on Instagram but the next day Instagram disappears from the app store, you won’t have your followers’ contact information or be able to keep in touch with your community. That is why a lot of creators who grow larger audiences on big social media platforms will invite their followers to niche spaces like Substack and Patreon where they can communicate with them directly, get their email addresses and offer paid subscription options.

Three Niche Social Networks and How They Work

There are hundreds of niche platforms for community-building, but it’s key to finding the spot that best fits your specific goals. Some niche platforms might be too small to easily build any sort of quality community and others might have policies that don’t work with the content you’re planning on posting.

These three niche social networks have pretty large user bases without the overwhelm of bigger platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube.

Substack

Created for writers, podcasters, videomakers, musicians, scientists and all-around culture-makers, Substack is a publishing platform where creators can connect directly with their fans.

Mostly centered around written content, Substack creators can share personal essays, discussion threads, podcasts and videos within subjects like politics, culture, science and technology. There are both free and paid subscription options so that creators can easily monetize their content.

Substack does have some organic discovery options with their recommendations feature and home tab. About twenty-five percent of all new subscribers find creators they love through Substack’s discoverability features.

Skillshare teacher and Writer, Cody Cook-Parrott, founded a newsletter on Substack where they shared personal essays and were about to bring in $80,000 of yearly revenue through their 24,000 paid and free subscribers.

Instagram and TikTok Creator, Heather Hurst started publishing on Substack less than a year ago and has managed to bring her newsletter, PIGPEN to over 13,000 subscribers. She created PIGPEN as a way to provide her social media followers with more quality content and dive deeper into topics she doesn’t always have time to explore on Instagram and TikTok.

According to this report done on over 74,000 Substack accounts, 36% of newsletters offer a paid plan with the average monthly subscription price being ten dollars a month. While it is definitely possible to monetize your content on Substack, 82% of all creators have less than 10,000 followers and there are only 212 newsletters with 100K or more subscribers.

Discord

Most people stay in touch with their college friends, family back home and their monthly book club through group chats. You might use iMessage or WhatsApp, but Discord offers many capabilities that most other group messaging platforms don’t. Discord is a comprehensive group chatting platform made to foster high-quality digital experiences between friends and fans.

On Discord, you can livestream or video chat which means that you can message the group while playing a game, watching a show and more. If you are looking to create a gaming community, host a weekly The White Lotus watching party or run a group tutoring session, you might choose Discord as your niche space.

There is limited organic discoverability on Discord so this is a better option for someone who already has a community that they can bring over to Discord. You can use Discord as a more intimate space to connect with your community.

When you bring your followers over from a bigger social media platform to Discord, you can message each other directly, play games together and watch video content, which can help foster deeper connections between you and your community members and your community members and each other.

Service providers, tech startups, anime fans and gamers all use Discord servers to better connect with those who share similar interests, ideas and goals.

Patreon

Co-founder of Patreon, Jack Conte, first thought of the idea for this fan-funded platform when his band’s videos were getting millions of views on YouTube but he was only ending up with hundreds of dollars in his pocket. He wanted a way for his fans to share their appreciation for his work through dollars rather than likes so he created Patreon. Patreon works by giving creators a direct line to their community where they can share exclusive content, downloadables, sneak-peaks, essays, how-tos, personalized advice and more.

You can share any content with your audience for free, but you can also offer paid subscriptions to generate a more regular income stream and offer more exclusive and luxury content.

Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton of the Celebrity Memoir Bookclub podcast use Patreon to offer bonus episodes, merch and personalized voice notes to their audience. Their Patreon gives them another income stream outside of their podcast’s ads and other paid collaborations.

Today there are over 300,000 accounts on Patreon, which have made $8 billion in total revenue since Patreon launched in 2013. While income varies depending on the amount of paid subscribers you have, Patreon can be a place for creators to connect directly with their audience and supplement their current income.

Creating Your Own Niche Community From Scratch

If you can’t find a niche space that works for you, you might build your own niche community from scratch. Self-hosted blogs, newsletters and forums all offer a more intimate space to connect with those who follow you elsewhere. The benefits of running your own niche community include:

Total control over your audience’s data
Connect directly with your audience through email or direct messaging
Not worrying about any algorithms or policy changes
Having more freedom to monetize
Complete customizing your community

Building a niche space from scratch by coding or designing your own website will give you the most control, but it will also require the most work to get it off the ground.

Bossbabe, a collective for women entrepreneurs, offers a niche community where their members can participate in a weekly coaching session, download business resources and connect with other business owners.

Since the founders of Bossbabe built their site from scratch, they were able to control all of the branding and creative decisions and offer additional resources like online classes and coaching sessions. On the other side, they had to pay a web developer and a creative team to get their community started and consider marketing expenses to bring new users to their site. They were able to bring together over 3,000 paying members into their community but they also have over three million followers on Instagram so they already had an audience to work with.

If you don’t have the budget to build a niche community from scratch, you can look into community-building platforms like Mighty Networks, Skool or Circle, which already have an interface for hosting your personalized niche community.

Some of these niche community builders like Skool offer course capabilities which means that you can offer tutorials, how-tos and full-blown courses to your community. If you already create educational content, you could also turn to Skillshare so you can get paid for the views your tutorials get and connect with other creative hobbyists and professionals.

You can also build a personal website or blog through website builders like Wix or Squarespace, which offer membership options like online courses, members-only pages and paid newsletters.

If you don’t have the time or budget to build a website, Mighty Networks page or Skillshare course, you can also create a group chat on WhatsApp to bring like-minded people together in a more intimate and interactive way.

How to Choose the Right Niche Community Option for You

Choosing the right niche space for your community will depend on your goals. If you’re a writer and want a place to share your essays, you might create your own blog, start a newsletter on Substack or create a Patreon where users can pay for access to your most recent pieces. If you are a business coach who specializes in social media marketing, you could create courses on Skool, build out a group coaching chat on WhatsApp or offer a members-only section on your Wix site.

By asking yourself these questions, you’ll be better able to evaluate the offerings of these niche community spaces:

Does the platform offer organic discovery?
What is your budget for the upfront costs to launch your niche community?
What is your budget for the monthly expenses of your community?
Do you plan to offer courses or other resources like downloadable templates or guides?
Do you plan to monetize your community in the immediate future?
How would you like to monetize your community in the distant future?
Do you already have a community on another social media platform?
What is the typical audience of the platform you’re exploring?
How will people find your community?

Building Your Niche Community

If you’re serious about starting a community in a niche space, you should start by doing some market research. For someone who already has a community on Instagram or TikTok, you could ask your audience if they would be interested in joining you in a niche space like Patreon, Substack or Discord.

If you’re starting a niche community from square one, you should take an hour or two to explore these community-building options and find the best ones for you. Remember that every community starts with one member and that if you continue to nourish your community members, share valuable content and market your little corner of the internet, you’ll be on your way to building a community your members love.

Written By

Calli Zarpas

Producer & Writer by occupation. Ceramicist & Newsletter Editor by avocation.