16 Jun How to Establish Your Brand Voice on Social Media
Creating a strong brand identity on social media has many facets, but one of the most important is the development of the brand voice. Here are a few steps for establishing your brand’s voice for social.
1) KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
Think about what your current followers want to hear about from your brand. It can help to use a tool like Facebook’s Audience Insights to see demographic and psychographic information about your audience. This can help you determine how you frame your voice and content on social. If you discover your page’s followers are all over 65, creating a lot of meme-based content won’t resonate. Spend some time getting to know your audience, and the ideas for how to speak to them will follow.
2) TRY SOME EXERCISES
One of our favorites at Ignite is the “we are, we are not” exercise. This helps you to determine boundaries for how you will write on social media. It’s easy to do, but is also easy to mess up. Each “we are / we are not” should work as a boundary for your writing and voice.
Good example: “We are funny. We are not goofy.”
Bad example: “We are smart. We are not stupid.”
See how the first “we are” example explains a feature of the brand, while the “we are not” serves to curtail that feature? The second example isn’t saying anything, except for that the brand is smart. What kind of smart? Are they smart, but not know-it-alls? Smart, but not technical? Use the “we are / we are not” exercise to help frame your brand’s voice in more narrow, easy to follow terms. Shoot for 15-20 statements to guide your writing.
Not this kind of exercise
3) FIND INSPIRATION
If you are developing a brand voice on social media, you should look to inspiration from your fellow social media marketers. Follow top brands and celebrities and look at how they make their voices come to life in social media posts, and adapt their approach to fit your brand. Keep in mind the brand or celebrity doesn’t necessarily have to be in your industry; inspiration from all over will help you develop a voice that’s all yours.
4) MAP OUT THE NITTY GRITTY
A lot of social media writing is less about what you say, and more about how you say it. In this case, details matter. Will you write in shorthand? Will you use slang? How about emojis? Make guidelines where you lay down the law of how you will write copy; this creates consistency and saves time when you are debating whether to use “bae”.
While developing a brand voice ultimately takes time and effort, these steps will get you started on the path to building a recognizable, consistent brand voice that will resonate on social media. If you’d rather have us do it for you, contact Ignite here: https://www.ignitesocialmedia.com//contact/
