How to Build a Community on Social Media (Without Building It on Social Media)

There’s a lot of advice out there about how to build a community on social media. To be fair, most of the recommended strategies aren’t wrong: post consistently, ask questions, respond to comments, et cetera.

But if you’ve been a social media denizen for very long, by now you’ve seen the way the landscape can change overnight. Even though the apps look (mostly) the same on the surface, the way content gets distributed, recommended, and displayed is perpetually up for revision. Meta apps increasingly favor recommended content (read: sponsored posts) over content from people you follow. And Twitter…isn’t even called Twitter anymore.

So, instead of directly answering your question “how to build a community on social media,” I’d like to propose a counter-question: what happens to your community if the social media platform changes?

Don’t build your house on shifting sand

Let’s say your nonprofit has 5,000 Instagram followers. Sounds pretty great. (We’d be losing our minds if Amenable had 5,000 followers.)

How many of those people could you actually reach if Instagram disappeared tomorrow?

You probably don’t have 5,000 email addresses. You don’t have their phone numbers. And even when you are connecting with them through Instagram, you can’t control whether they see your next post. You may have an audience of 5,000, but you don’t necessarily have a direct relationship with that audience—that’s the difference between building a following and building a community.

Social media is a great way to help people discover your organization. It can help them see what you’re doing, become familiar with the people behind your work, and decide they want to know more. But as far as building a community goes, social media isn’t actually that great. Or rather, it’s not very good at helping you keep a community.

It’s a lot like going to a networking event: meeting people is the start of relationship-building, but if you never exchange contact info with anyone you meet, how are you ever going to connect with those people again? You can’t predict when the hosts will throw another mixer, and you can’t guarantee that all the same people will be invited or attend. Do you see the parallel?

That’s my answer to the question of how to build a community on social media: use social media to send people somewhere else, to where the community actually is. Your website, email list, blog, text updates, events, physical media, and in-person relationships give people ways to connect with your organization that don’t depend on an algorithm deciding if your post is worth their attention.

So, how do you build a community on social media?

You can start by making your social media presence a place people want to discover you. Share things that are genuinely useful, interesting, encouraging, or meaningful. Give people a reason to care about your mission. Respond when people reach out. Make it easy to understand who you are and what you do. Most typical social media advice applies here.

Then, and this is the important part, give your people a next step. Invite them to join your email list, or send them to an article on your website. Tell them about an upcoming event. Give them a way to volunteer, donate, attend, participate, or learn more.

In other words, use social media to build a community beyond social media. 

Build something you can keep

Social media platforms will continue to change, and the way people use these platforms will change, too. I’m not saying we should entirely abandon social media (yet), but we certainly should stop asking it to do a job it was never very good at doing.

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