Why You Should Build Your Brand’s Social Media Community with Purpose

Updated: December, 2018.

So you’ve been tasked with building your brand’s social media community management strategy.

Fantastic.

After a planning exercise, you identified your target channels, key stakeholders, and objectives for growth. For most, this is more than enough to start blogging, tweeting, curating, connecting.

After all, you’re working towards an established objective. That’s important. But we’d reckon your strategy is still missing one mission critical element:

A Guiding Purpose.

Where a goal ties your efforts to a measurable, desired state (1000 Facebook group members; 40 monthly event attendees; 25 user-generated content submissions per week), a purpose sets your sights on something BIGGER. Much BIGGER than the marketing itself.

Take a look at the purpose that guides other community strategies.

(Tweets are a few years back, but still solid.)

—–

Ally, formerly of Scoop.it, a social content curation platform.

@JHKrak Scoop.it = Knowledge exchange. Making the world smarter. cc @ScentTrail @tamcdonald

— Ally Greer (@allygreer) May 24, 2013

Scoop.it is a technology company. It requires a growing number of monthly subscribers to survive. But their core purpose is not, “drive leads through consistent content marketing.” (Though it might be one of their goals.)

Their purpose is to make the world smarter through the exchange and sharing of knowledge.

That’s powerful.

To execute on it, they may choose to devote some time and resources into people or platforms that align with that vision, like TEDx or Quora. Whatever their strategy is, you can bet they’re channeling energy to engage with people who want to make the world a smarter place also.

Prolific community manager Tim McDonald had this to say:

@jhkrak Making it easy for everyone to have a voice. #cmgrhangout cc @jhkrak @ScentTrail

— Tim McDonald (@tamcdonald) May 24, 2013

Tim believes that what people say matters. That purpose stays top of mind as he interacts with the thousands (and potentially millions) of people who are looking for the opportunity to speak up and be heard.

And Marty Smith of @StoryofCancer.

@JHKrak Curing Cancer, Empowering Cancer Patients, Helping NonProfit Cancer Centers Compete Online…purposes driving @CureCancerStart :)M

— Martin (Marty) Smith (@ScentTrail) May 24, 2013

Marty wants to cure cancer; end of story. Followers of his social properties all resonate with that purpose, and contribute content (and hopefully, donations) to support the mission.

Do you see the difference?

Can you feel it?

Building an online community with purpose is a fundamentally different roadmap; it’s emotional and transparent. It isn’t self-promotional or platform-centric. Brands with a strong purpose state it proudly.

It doesn’t just guide the way you create content. It guides the why.

Our purpose is to ignite and nurture the conversation between consumer and brand.

What’s your brand’s purpose?