What is your audience for?

Something has been rattling around in my head for a few weeks—this week's quick thought—is our audience's purpose just to be more?

It seems that whenever we discuss audience, we talk about size.

Here are some examples of recent conversations I have had: Someone looked at my Twitter following, considered it my biggest audience, and wondered why I don’t post on that channel. The host of (what I consider to be) a very popular podcast is feeling down as their listener numbers are stagnating. A start-up co-founder thinks they need over 5000 followers for their company's LinkedIn page.

And, there are countless other conversations we have as marketers about moving all the vanity metrics up and to the right.

Plus, of course, the hustle porn advice that tells us our personal brands need followers, impressions, and likes.

But what’s it for?

What purpose does our audience serve?

What do we want them to do?

And maybe most importantly, how many of them do we really need to do that to be successful?

Of course, size could be important if your business is ad-supported or you are running for a political office.

It’s also great for social proof to have public signals of popularity - if that’s how the person you want to act, let’s say a buyer, is influenced by seeing others like them also like you as it helps them build trust.

But, that aside, and I used this line a couple of weeks ago (in A/B Test to Porn), I think most of us would quickly get over the crushing disappointment that only 100 people visited our website, read our email, or saw our LinkedIn post this week, if all of them were our ideal customers and signed a purchase order the same day.

If they did the thing we wanted them to do.

The thing the audience is for.

The motivation for the big vanity numbers is that when we cast our net wide, trawling and catching every fish, when we haul in that catch - the seething mass of EVERYTHING from the sea that we are hauling aboard - in that net somewhere, there are a few ideal customers that we needed this week.

We feel somehow comforted by that. More surely means more.

But being just “more” is not what our audience is for; that’s not our goal.

Or theirs.

Yes, they also need to find us - hopefully, a solution to their problem.

Maybe it's the word "audience" - like we are putting on a theatre production or a sporting event, but that’s not what the audience is for, to watch us do our thing, to be counted as impressions or views.

They need to act with us; that’s what we want them to do.

That’s what our audience is for, to act.

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