By this time, if you’ve been diligently reading our blog, you’ve already learned how to construct, operationalize, and communicate your purpose. But unless your purpose statement is under 140 characters, you’ve still got work to do.
Being able to communicate your purpose not only to employees and the outside world but to different audiences on different platforms is a necessity for your business. Depending on whether you’re engaging with employees through your business Facebook page, sending out an e-newsletter or taking part in a Twitter chat, the way you educate and engage people around your purpose will change. Today, we’re sharing some best practices to share your business purpose on different platforms.
An e-newsletter is the main way many businesses connect with their clients, customers, and contacts. These people often have already encountered your business purpose, whether through your website or through speaking with employees. For this platform, it’s not as important to define your business purpose again, but rather to show how it’s being used in your operations. Use the newsletter to share a purpose-related accomplishment each month, whether it’s a new client who aligns with your purpose or an employee service outing. Keep your contacts in the loop about your efforts to run your business around your central purpose.
Keep your Twitter messages short and sweet: you’ve got no choice! What Twitter lacks in characters, it makes up for in audience size, so you need to figure out how to target a certain segment of the Twitter population with a concise message. Let meaningful hashtags help you join conversations around your purpose. Use Twitter chats to connect with like-minded businesses and individuals to more closely target your message. And instead of thinking words, think images: tweets with images get 2x the engagement of those that don’t. Use images to illustrate purpose and add some words to the picture to stretch out the character limit.
In many ways, Facebook offers the best of both Twitter and e-newsletter worlds: your character limit is much higher, you can add images and hashtags, and connect with your close business contacts. In order to best leverage this platform, think about how you can use your Facebook profile to humanize your business, tell stories, and share your purpose through your business experiences. Post #ThrowbackThursday pictures of business founders when they just started out and complement them with a story about how they started the business with purpose in mind. Offer a behind-the-scenes look at a business event to show how you and your employees are working with purpose.
Let us know: how do you show your purpose on different platforms?
Photo Credit: University of Salford via Flickr Creative Commons
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