Best practice for Audience creation within AEP

[RaymondCh4]

Hi experts! 

I am looking for managing audience creation within AEP for my organization. As we have multiple BU (media marketing, website experience, email marketing, etc) who will be creating audiences within the same AEP instance, I want to ask in particular: 

• What is the best strategy to create audience that would avoid duplicated effort to create the "same" audience across BUs, and allows audience to be re-used across the organization?
• Is it the best to create smaller segments and then combine these small segments into 1 more complex segment? Or it's best to avoid segment dependent on another segment? 
• Is there any naming convention advice that we can follow? 

Thanks!

[itsMeTechy]

you can create folder in the audience page, and so the audiences can be organized based on the business unit. 

if different BU want to create similar audience, i would still think through to have different audiences for each BU as at any time 1 particular BU may want to change the condition which may not be required for another. if you still think that you need to use the same audience for different BU, then you need to operationally control it with some process outside the product for not duplicating the audience. 

creating an audience and then using in another audience is fine. but in general this option is used to create an base audience with conditions which is required for many audiences and then using the base audience and build the other audience on top of it. but again its not hard and fast rule that it should be used for this purpose only. if your audience is very complicated and you want to split the conditions logically into chunks for validation purpose and create different audience and then you can join them together for you final audience.

--ssj