--- title: 'How to Cultivate, Grow, and Monetize Your Social Audience' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=se698sz119M' video_id: 'se698sz119M' date: 2026-07-14 duration_sec: 0 --- # How to Cultivate, Grow, and Monetize Your Social Audience > Source: [How to Cultivate, Grow, and Monetize Your Social Audience](https://youtube.com/watch?v=se698sz119M) ## Summary Anthony Del Conte, Entrepreneur's Director of Audience Development, explains why creators and brands must own their audience relationships rather than rely solely on social platforms. He outlines a three-part process for building a loyal, engaged audience and diversifying revenue beyond platform-dependent monetization. ### Key Points - **Introduction to Audience Development** [00:00] — Anthony Del Conte introduces himself as Entrepreneur's Director of Audience Development, explaining his role in strategy across social, newsletters, and subscriptions. - **Social as Top of Funnel** [01:30] — Social media is the top of the funnel for reaching and engaging viewers, then providing deeper value in exchange for a stronger relationship (e.g., webinar sign-ups). - **Examples for Brands and Creators** [03:00] — A makeup brand can offer educational content (how to contour) and then a discount in exchange for email/SMS opt-in. A food creator can offer free recipes via email, then upsell a paid community or daily recipe service. - **Benefits of Social Platforms** [05:00] — Platforms offer discoverability, creator funds (e.g., TikTok's fund requires 10k followers and 100k views in 30 days), YouTube AdSense, brand deals, and affiliate links. - **Risks of Relying on Platforms** [07:00] — You don't control the relationship; platforms come and go (e.g., Facebook's decline, TikTok's uncertain future), change algorithms, and can lock or hack accounts. Monetization is unpredictable (fluctuating CPMs, opaque creator funds). - **The Three-Part Process** [10:00] — 1) Define your value for the audience. 2) Create content that works. 3) Confirm who your audience is and what they want more of. This builds trust, which is key for brand deals and affiliate success. - **Trust and Authenticity** [12:00] — 50% of consumers make purchases based on influencer posts; trust with Gen Z and millennials is 60-70%. Authentic value is crucial—creators who are 'famous for being famous' face backlash (e.g., Poppy vending machine campaign). ### Conclusion To build a sustainable business, creators and brands must focus on owning their audience relationship through quality content and direct channels, rather than relying solely on social platforms that can change or disappear. ## Transcript Hi everybody. Thank you so much for joining us today to learn more about how you can cultivate, grow and monetize your social audience. I'm Brittany Robbins, executive editor of entrepreneur.com. And I'm pleased to introduce our speaker today, Anthony Del Conte, director of audience development, who will take the reins in just a moment. But first, I just want to talk a little bit about this new event series that we are kicking off. And this webinar is the inaugural event from the series. And essentially, Entrepreneur is hosting a series of workshops across the U.S. designed to help entrepreneurs and marketers unlock the secrets to business growth. Each session will feature a leading expert who will provide actionable insights on crucial business topics. We will have both digital webinars such as this one over the ensuing months, but also look out for in-person events coming soon. Our first one is slated for May 20th in New York City. And here's the best part, the tickets are free. So keep an eye out in your inbox and on entrepreneur.com for a link to sign up and there will be many more expert driven entrepreneur events in the future. And with that, I will turn it over to Anthony. Cool. Thanks, Brittany. This is actually good timing for me. I'm supposed to give a speech at a wedding in a couple of weeks, so this is good practice for that. But anyway, I'm Anthony Del Conte. I'm Entrepreneur's Director of Audience Development. And I'll start with what does that mean? What does that look like day to day? And these are questions my family asks me every Christmas, and I tell them I work with computers. But what it really means for you guys is I work across our social offerings, newsletters, subscription products. And really, in addition to working hands on with the team, I kind of think about what's the big picture strategy, right? Like, what does our funnel look like? So if you look at social right very top of the funnel, how do we reach and engage with viewers there and then provide them with content that's worthwhile, right? So we can entertain them, we can inform them, educate our audience, encourage them to explore the side hustle or small business ideas, right? And then from there, we start to think about like, how do we provide a deeper form of value in exchange for you guys, the audience deepening the relationship, right? right so like you guys signed up for this webinar today um because you know you thought this topic was value right and what that allows us to do is that allows us to think about like again how do we provide this content and then what's the next relevant piece in your journey right how are we going to keep on interacting with you how are we going to retain you how are we going to work you toward another product we offer or maybe a product partner offers right And then from there, we start to build out buckets and that's kind of like the overview of it. And I think it's not just media companies that want to think about social this way. This is relevant to creators and brand accounts as well. We took a survey before this, and I think there was a pretty large cross section of both categories. So I want to make sure this is in broad strokes and everything here is relevant to everyone. Feel free to ask questions if you want me to elaborate on something. But say you're running a brand account, you sell makeup, right? So maybe at the top of your social funnel, you chase some trends, right? You have some content highlighting your products, but maybe you also provide some educational content, right? Like how to contour, how to apply foundation, how to find the right products for you, right? From there, maybe you offer something of value in exchange for a sign up, right? I think with brands, this is, you know, you often see like, all right, 10% off your first order if you provide an email and a phone number and then opt into our mailing list and SMS, right? And then from there, it's an opportunity for that brand to focus on getting you to keep going down the funnel, right? How do you convert and buy? How do you continue reaching them on social so they'll come back to you? How do you really own that relationship? Another example, right? If you're a creator in the food space, your content may be recipe creation, it might be tips and tricks, right? But if someone wants a full recipe from you, maybe they need to sign up for an email list. And maybe, you know, the first couple of recipes are free, right? You give them a couple of months, but if they want a daily recipe, for instance, right? Or they want to join a community or they want to watch a live, that's maybe an opportunity to, you know, keep going and work them down that funnel, right? And I think like what's interesting about this and what's relevant about this is it doesn't prevent you from doing these kind of wider brand deals or sponsorships, right? Like entrepreneur still pulls in a lot of money from sponsorships. Like, If you look at creators in the food space, for instance, right, they're still doing brand deals, you'll still see like our place pans, right? And they'll be giving that code on behalf of the audience. But like, you also want to think about how you diversify that audience and, you know, or how you diversify that revenue and really own that audience. and i'm telling you guys this because i think the the earlier you start to think about your social presence is the top of funnel opportunity and the earlier you start to think about owning that relationship with the audience the better position you're going to be along so anthony why don't you tell everybody why it's so important to own that kind of relationship yeah so absolutely i think to do that let me talk a little bit about kind of the benefits of social platforms and then where there are some limitations. Right. So like the good when it comes to why platforms are valuable, the big thing is always going to be discoverability. Right. It's your chance to put yourself out there, to put your brand out there, build that initial audience. If you think about like the traditional model with something like Hollywood, you have to be discovered by a small set of gatekeepers. Right. Now you go and you grind and you create content and then all of a sudden you're in front of a few thousand. a couple hundred thousand, a few million people, right? I think platforms also have some modernization opportunities. So if you just wanted to focus on a platform audience, right, you can look at creator funds, right? So with TikTok, if you have, I think it's, I want to say 10,000 followers and 100,000 video views in the last 30 days, you're eligible for monetization, right? Or their creator fund. You have on platform monetization revenue opportunities. YouTube AdSense is the big one, although with creator funds, we'll get into why your mileage may vary there. You have brand deals, right? So we mentioned brand deals before. This is probably what most people think of when they think of how creators monetize. um and in most cases that's based on the reach and engagement you have on a platform right lowest lift opportunity is probably affiliate links right so you receive a commission for each sale made through your unique affiliate link you can do you know an affiliate program that's a specific brand you can do an affiliate network for a wider variety of brands um i'll touch on all these in a little bit but i also want to touch on like the I don't necessarily want to say the bad when it comes to platforms, but something you should keep in mind and why it's important to own that relationship. With platforms, you don't control the relationship with your audience. And I can't emphasize enough how much that puts you and your business at risk, right? You are essentially building on rented land. Few reasons for that, right? Platforms come and go. Facebook's still an active audience there. There's some people who think, you know, there's the whole dead internet theory that basically you just have bots creating content for bots, regardless of how you feel about it, right? Flashback to 2009, Facebook was the coolest thing in the world, right? When you have conversations with people about the creator economy now and influencers, no one really mentions Facebook, right? It's Instagram, it's TikTok, right? Another great example, right? TikTok is what? Over the past like 100, 150 days, there've been several, you know, there's a back and forth conversation about is it going to exist, right? Sorry about that. There's back and forth conversation about is it going to exist, right? If you work in social in any capacity, there's that joke about like, what's our strategy for X, Y, and Z platform, right? Like every time something comes up and an executive sees it, there's this question of like, what are we doing there, right? I think there was a three-day period in January where like, everyone's like, what's your red note strategy? What's your red note strategy? I don't like has anyone been super active there right like maybe this is a good time to get you guys interacting um go ahead and drop in the comments like what's your favorite social platform that you know it's kind of niche or no one is really on anymore I made it like a meerkat joke a while ago but wasn't really relevant to a lot of people um and then you know like the other thing about platforms is they change right um so touching on Facebook again I have a background in Legacy Media right I was at CNBC a while ago I'm here an entrepreneur I was at men's Journal um and you go to these industry dinners and like you have conversations about how like you had entire brands like buzzfeed huffington post now this they built their business model around that traffic that facebook offered right and it wasn't just upstarts it was a lot of the big legacy players would change their content change their staffing to really chase that traffic and it's the type of thing where like the traffic went away gradually and then all at once and i think it's really forced the media media industry and space to think about like how you build these direct relationships and how you have better ownership of that funnel but a big thing that i talk about and i talk about this on linkedin all the time is like creators need to learn that lesson right and don't learn it the hard way um I mean, beyond that, like your account can get hacked, you can get locked out, you can get reported for community violations. There are just so many things that happen where like if you were focused on that platform as your livelihood, you're putting yourself at risk if you're not thinking about how you own that audience. Right. Not to mention, if we want to talk about the monetization opportunities I mentioned before, you have creator funds. CPMs fluctuate there, right? So some months you're going to do really well. Others you get a couple bucks. Maybe the platform opens up the creator fund to a wider variety of people, right? I think like Snapchat 2020, they launched a creator fund. They said, we're going to give away a million dollars a day. And they quickly backtracked and it was down to like, okay, it'll be $100,000 a day. like these are marketing employees to get creators to move to a platform but there's not a ton of transparency right we talked about youtube ad sense you know your mileage may vary if you're creating content about your med school journey and what it's like taking the mcats and you know google can serve a bunch of mcat prep ads you're probably going to get a good effective CPM, right? Something a little more general interest, that CPM is going to be lower. Even brand deals, right? Like dollars are increasingly shifting to influencers from TV, but there's still questions around attribution and value, right? I was watching another webinar the other day where they kind of talked about like someone made the point that a CMO is more than willing to spend a few million on a Super Bowl spot, but sometimes it's a struggle to get them to approve budget for creator campaigns, right? You're still dependent on the algorithm. You might find yourself in a lose lose situation where a brand wants edits to your piece to highlight their product. And then you know that's going to make the video perform a little bit worse. It's going to hurt your views. It's going to hurt your engagement. But you're stuck there. Right. So I think because of all this, it's really worth focusing on how you own that relationship with your audience instead. So just jumping in, now that you've sort of outlined that trade-off, regardless of what your ultimate goal is, whether that's monetizing via platform growth, brand deals, or owning the relationship with your audience, like you said, the key component here I think really is to first figure out how to build a loyal and engaged audience. A fair number of the folks on this call who answered that survey have smaller accounts that they really want to grow. So what should they be doing to achieve that? Yeah, so absolutely. I think like if you focus on creating quality content and really like building something for a value for your audience that comes across as authentic, that's the best thing you can do regardless of how you want to monetize. Right. So like it'll benefit you if you want to do brand deals, if you want to own that relationship. It's really like the foundation you're going to use to build all this. Right. And I like to, there's kind of a three part process that I think is super intertwined here. Right. So like one, you want to define your value for your audience and you know, that's like both how you represent it to them. And then what, you know, kind of guides you as you create content. Two, you're going to create content and figure out that works. And then three, you're going to confirm who your audience is and what you want more. Right. And when I was when I was prepping for this the other day, I was like, oh, man, this would make like a really nice, fancy flywheel graphic that I could post on LinkedIn. But unfortunately, my brain doesn't work that way. So maybe I'll rope in someone from our design team to help me with that. But I think it's important to figure out the value your content provides and then who your audience is. Right. That's that's the long and short of it. Part of why brands like creators, right? Going back to brand deals and why affiliate links work and why there are opportunities for things like community and courses, it's because creators can develop trust with their audience, right? So there was a white paper that came out from Casey Lewis and Day One Agency. I think it was like something like 50% of consumers made purchases based on influencer posts, right? When you look at influencer trust with Gen Z and millennials, it's something like 60 or 70%. This only works if you're building a quality relationship and offering something of value. I think like, you know, I talked about what we do at Entrepreneur, right? We focus on how does this content help our audience, right? If you look in the wider creator and influencer industry, I think there's starting to be this interesting shift and maybe even a little bit of backlash toward creators who previously just provided entertainment. So I'll bring up like the Poppy vending machine example, right? If you're not as terminally online as I am, Poppy sent personalized full-size branded vending machines to a bunch of creators as part of a Super Bowl campaign. It wasn't very well received. You see a lot of comments that were like, oh, they should have sent these to a hospital for the nurse's lounge or, you know, a school for the teacher's lounge. I think some of what separates this activation from some of the more successful ones you see that come and go without kind of bringing that sentiment is like a lot of the creators they chose were just kind of creators who were big for being creators, right? So there's that old knock against like certain reality celebrities where it's like you're famous for being famous. and i i bring that up and i go on that tangent because like i think it's really important to define your value and think about your audience right we have a video and white paper series see how you know we're going to offer a white paper there's additional value there but we have video and white paper series coming up with alex from girls club and she's personal branding expert one of the things she talks about is really like defining the value for your audience right Are you helping laid off tech workers find their next job? If you're a New York City influencer, are you just showing your workout routine or are you saying, I also happen to have a corporate job and I've noticed that when the new interns come in, they don't follow these unwritten rules or they don't know how to dress. So here's a guide for what you should be doing. Are you