Brand vision and mission statements are vital, it’s agreed. But what about tailored versions for your social media? Here’s how to do it and why you should.

What are vision and mission statements?

A vision statement describes a brand’s desired future, or the impacts the company will have on its customers and the world. It’s a statement of what the brand hopes to ultimately become. Mission statements, meanwhile, define a company’s purpose, objectives and approach. It details what the company is doing to achieve its vision statement. In other words, your mission statement is like an action-based map for your vision statement.

Why do brands need vision and mission statements?

They make a brand’s values clear. By articulating your brand’s purpose, aims and beliefs, vision and mission statements make it clear what your brand is all about. They are unifying, helping to focus the brand, and they can be motivational, highlighting common interests and goals between both colleagues and customers.

Perhaps most importantly, making your brand values, intentions and approaches clear through vision and mission statements has a profound effect on the behaviour of consumers. When customers believe they share values with a company, they are more likely to stay loyal to it.

A 2021 study by Stackla found that 88% of consumers consider authenticity a key factor when considering which brands they will support. Likewise, 77% of consumers say they buy from brands whose values align with their own (Havas Group, 2019). It’s not just about the product and the price anymore – feeling is at the heart of branding success. Increasingly, a brand is defined in the eyes of its consumers by its principles rather than its products. Therefore communicating values is essential to gaining and maintaining customers.

Why is social media so important in marketing?

Social media is often the first point of contact with a business when potential customers are researching products or companies. Instagram has over 500 million active daily users, with 90% following at least one business. What’s more, 35% of users will make a purchase on Instagram in 2023 (Insider Intelligence, 2023). And that’s just one social platform.

The role of relationships in marketing is becoming increasingly clear. Customers want to feel a connection with a brand – they don’t just want product updates and sales information. Social media provides unrivalled opportunities to capitalise on social ties, social influences and social identity. This is because social media is a unique environment where, if you get it right, posts from friends and family can fit seamlessly besides those from businesses on a user’s feed. Social platforms allow brands to share promotional posts without coming across ‘salesy’, and instead blend in organically with potential customers’ feeds.

Why you need to write tailored statements for your social media

So you’re clear on why vision and mission statements are so important, and you understand the immense opportunities offered by social media. But why do you need to marry them together?

When it comes to social media, it’s even more important to keep your values consistent and discernable. Your followers are faced with your posts every day. This means you have an opportunity to reel them in tightly if you get it right, but you could also risk losing followers (and consequently engagement and customers) if they start to feel disconnected from your brand because they no longer feel an affinity with its values. Failing to make your values clear and consistent risks pushing customers into the arms of a competitor that aligns with them better.

Brands are often at risk of jumping onto social media blindly without first considering exactly how to use these platforms to reach their company goals. It’s very easy to do this, get caught up in vanity metrics, and forget why you’re really there. Creating additional vision and mission statements that guide your social media presence can help to avoid this.

How to write your social media vision and mission statements

Your social media vision statement needs to outline your business’s goals specifically in relation to social media. Likewise, your social media mission statement needs to detail how you’ll do it. These statements still need to be closely aligned with your overall brand statements in order to feel authentic and reflective of the real-life customer experience, but social media needs to be at their cores. Here are some top tips for writing them.

Be specific

Take time to understand your core objectives. What exactly are you trying to achieve on social media for your company? It could be improving brand recognition, increasing reach, repositioning your brand, or generating demand. Though you may well want to do more than one of these through your marketing as a whole, don’t try to do them all with social media – allocate it a specific role to play.

You may even benefit from multiple statements, one for each social platform you intend to use. Think about each platform as having a different audience with a different set of behaviours that need to be catered to. In the same way that you wouldn’t address the Queen with same rhetoric as you would your young nephew, you need to consider what each different audience expects and responds to on each social platform.

Identify your audience

Consider whom you want to reach and ask yourself the following questions. Why are they on social media? Which platforms do they use the most? How do they engage with posts and other users? What do they want from their social media experience?

Next, you need to specify what you want your audience to do on social media. Do you want them to share your posts? Are you trying to encourage people to visit your blog? Do you want them to perceive your brand differently? Or do you want users to buy your products as a direct result of posts?

You can use this information to form a statement that details which platform you are using, why you’re using it, and how this will impact your business. For example, you may conclude that your target audience are on social media to gain knowledge; perhaps they follow informative accounts, use social media to research current events, general public opinions and new products. Maybe you want this audience to engage by asking you questions as a result of trusting your brand’s knowledge. This might lead you to write the following social media mission statement: We are on Instagram to demonstrate thought leadership, which will reposition our brand so that our audiences view us as academic, knowledgeable and experts in our field.

Brand Example: National Geographic

National Geographic is a good example of a brand knowing their audience. While there is no published social media-specific mission statement, its general mission statement is to use “the power of science, exploration, education and storytelling to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world.” This comes across on both its Instagram and Twitter accounts, but in notably different ways.

Its Instagram is centred on visual storytelling. It posts striking, often awe-inspiring images of the natural world accompanied by captions written by the photographers themselves. National Geographic make the most of this visual platform to let images (and the creators of those images) speak for themselves.

On Twitter, meanwhile, a less image-heavy medium, National Geographic manages to transpose its values, while also adapting to a different platform. National Geographic still uses images on Twitter, appealing to its visually motivated audience, but it also acknowledges that Twitter’s audience expects more text-heavy content. It therefore uses Twitter posts to direct readers to articles on its website using links. This suggests that its mission on Instagram is to accrue engagement in the form of likes, comments, shares and follows by wowing people visually, while on Twitter it aims to increase website traffic.

Test, edit, repeat

Each time you prepare a new post, ask yourself whether it will contribute to your vision in a streamlined way. Keep referring back to your statements, and don’t be afraid to adjust them if you feel they are no longer reflective of where you need to be headed.

You should adapt your statements based on how your audience responds to your posts. It’s okay to begin with a little trial and error! Once you’ve tested out a few different posts, use the analytical features on social media to see how people have engaged with them. Which ones have had the most reach? Do followers prefer humour or informative posts? Which demographics started following you after seeing a particular post? Were they from your target market? Find out what works best and use this information to develop your statements and inform your future posts.

Putting your social media vision and mission statements into practice

Stay streamlined with your posting

Your followers are unlikely to see every single one of your posts. In fact, they might only see a small percentage of them. Therefore, you can afford to reinforce the same messages multiple times. You will actually have more impact if you do, instead of trying to cover too many different ideas that will make your brand seem less cohesive and be less memorable to users.

So use your social media statements to help you. What did you want your social profiles to say about your brand? What makes you unique? Consider your statements, and pick two or three key topics that align with it. Make sure all your posts touch on these, sticking to your chosen messages for a good while before moving on to new ones.

Another way to stay streamlined with your content is to try and stay consistent emotively. Try identifying three emotions that you want your brand to be associated with or evoke in your audience, and ensure that every post is coloured by at least one of these.

Create a brand persona

Building on your brand voice, your brand persona is an amalgamation of personality traits, attitudes and values that forms a sort of ‘frontman’ for your brand, helping you connect with your target audience. Your social media statements can indicate what that ‘frontman’ might be like. You will already have thought about who you are talking to in order to create your statement, so now consider who that audience will respond to. Do you want to be seen as energetic, academic, knowledgeable, approachable, professional, informal or something else?

While this consistent brand persona is important in all aspects of marketing, it is especially important on social media because interactions between individuals are more common. Letting your social media statements guide your every interaction will help you to embrace and exude your values at all times. This will make your brand seem more unified and consistent, helping to mould your brand into a streamlined persona that feels unique, memorable and personal to customers.

Be human!

Your social media is not just a place to roll out information about products and sales. Talk to your followers! Engage in personal interactions with individuals, answer questions, and make them feel welcome on your page and validated for engaging. Communicating with customers is easier than ever on social; even simply liking a user’s comment on a post is validating, conveying agreement, approval or even just recognition.

Social media is perhaps the only form of marketing where brands can have what feels like personal relationships with individual consumers – even larger brands. Social platforms like Instagram allow for direct conversation between customer and company, be that through comments, direct messages, story polls, or live videos. This is partly why having a unified brand persona is hugely advantageous. If customers feel like they know your brand, almost like it’s another friend they follow rather than a disparate group of colleagues, your brand is more likely to feel organic and gain loyalty online.

Colour scheme and stylisation

Consistency between your logo, colour palette, filters, and stylisation are essential for brand recognition. In fact, using a signature colour can increase brand recognition by 80% (Reboot, 2018). So, not only do these factors need to be consistent throughout your page and other platforms (or at least have recognisable traits in common with your other platforms), but they need to reflect and embody your brand and its tone in a way that is unique. Consult your social media statements again. What kind of aesthetics align with them? For example, if you want your brand to come across as academic and trustworthy, then your colour scheme and stylisation should reflect this. Perhaps more subdued colours are appropriate here, alongside formal, neat-looking posts with a higher text-to-image ratio.

Brand Example: Lucy & Yak

The clothing brand Lucy & Yak, best known for its ethical dungarees, does a good job of this. Its Instagram page maintains an energetic, bright colour pallet of bold primary colours against pastel backgrounds alongside a bubbly logo. Primarily aimed at Millennials and GenZ, the brand’s colour scheme and stylisation are fun, youthful, and lively, reflecting qualities that are attractive to their audience.

Marketing Takeaway

Social media offers the potential to lift your brand to new levels in terms of improving brand recognition, increasing reach, gaining loyal customers and more. But in order to make the most out of it, you need to pinpoint exactly why you’re there, what you want to achieve and how you’re going to do it. Social media-specific vision and mission statements are a great way to do this, providing you with a framework to keep referring back to, and ensuring that you’re keeping streamlined and consistent in your approach.

Written by Jodie Sheehan, Updated by Becky Tudor