How to find your social media voice
Setting up your business on Twitter or Facebook is easy. However, you can’t just hop on and start posting without thinking about a few things first. Perhaps the most important part of your social media presence is creating the voice for your brand. It’s important that your brand’s voice on social media matches up with your brand characteristics and values. If it doesn’t, you run the risk of confusing and frustrating customers with your conflicting tone and messages.
So, how do you find your brand voice? First off, think about your audience and what their personalities might be like. What kind of tone and language would they respond to? You also need to think about how your want people to perceive your brand. Do you want people to think of your brand as fun? Knowledgeable? Friendly? Answering these questions should give you a good idea as to which direction you want to go in.
Next, you need to start developing the character for your brand. Here are four elements you need to consider when you’re developing a character:
- PERSONA: Is your brand friendly? Playful? Inspiring? Professional?
- TONE: How do you want to speak to your customers? Are you honest? Sincere? Snarky?
- LANGUAGE: Think about the style of language you use. Technical? Casual? Simple? Relaxed?
- PURPOSE: What is the purpose of your communication? To engage? Inform? Entertain? Help? Educate?
Once you have chosen these elements, you can combine them to create a character for your brand’s voice. When you’re writing updates, it’s much easier to keep within the brand voice if you have a character and personality in mind. It also helps to keep things consistent if you have multiple people creating content for your brand online. An example of a character for a brand would be “a friendly next-door neighbour” or “your snarky friend from college”.
Another thing to keep in mind is that while each social media platform might have different content and slightly different audiences, your overall brand voice should stay as consistent as possible. Taking the time to develop your social media voice will help make sure you sound like one brand across all platforms.
Have you taken steps to develop and refine your brand voice? Has it worked for you? Please share your experiences with us in the comments section.
