Ways to Establish Your Brand’s Voice on Social Media
One of the main reasons businesses big and small utilize social media is to establish a clear brand voice. The way that a brand communicates with its audience through social media platforms is key to creating a strong public image. This is something that a website or blog post simply can’t achieve, as social media allows brands to respond to customers in real-time, creating a connection with their audience which is far more humanistic and natural than any other form of digital communication. Find Social Media Marketing Services near me.
If you are looking to build your brand voice through social media, but aren’t quite sure where to start, read our top tips on how to get there.
Be Consistent Across Channels
If you have one person posting on Facebook, another on Twitter, and another on Instagram, then it’s likely that each of those people has different communication styles and are responding to customers differently. You want to avoid this at all costs.
It’s important that your tone of voice is consistent across channels, so it appears to customers that all responses are coming from the same person. In fact, this should really go beyond your social channels. Your brand voice needs to be consistent across your website, social media, emails, etc.
If you have more than one person writing digital content, make sure that you’ve established the tone of voice for your brand so it appears consistent throughout. If you fail to have a consistent tone across your platforms, you won’t create a strong brand identity and customers will start to doubt your brand.
Write Like You Talk
While your brand may have a buyer persona and a specific target audience, it’s important to remember that social media is a public platform. That means that anyone and everyone could visit your profile, so you need to make sure that your content is clear and avoids any technical jargon.
You want your platform to be accessible to everyone, not just industry experts. The clearest way to achieve this is to write like you talk. Creating a conversational tone of voice makes your social media copy much more natural and easy to read – appealing to the masses, not just a few. It also makes your brand sound much more real, rather than a computerized robot spouting out Wikipedia pages. Social media platforms are typically chatty and informal, so remember to reflect that in your own brand tone of voice.
Invest in Customer Service
Aside from being a great platform for promoting your business and sharing updates, social media is a great customer service platform. Customers are increasingly sending tweets or direct messages on Instagram to get fast answers to their questions or queries. Having a platform that customers can call upon to quickly connect with a customer service team when they need them is incredibly important for building customer relationships and loyalty. It’s important that this instant communication from the customer’s side is matched with fast replies from your customer service team. Make sure that you have a real person on the other end, fielding requests.
Remember that the internet is written in ink – not in pencil. Every message you post on the internet can be scrutinized by the public, so it’s imperative that your responses are empathetic, helpful, and professional, even if you’re dealing with a particularly disgruntled customer. Efficiency is key here too! There’s no point in a customer using a platform like Twitter and Instagram to get through to you quickly if your response is days, or even weeks old. This will just lead to further frustration on the customer’s end.
It’s not always easy to manage different customer queries coming through on different platforms, especially if you’re a large company with hundreds of messages being received every day. That’s why it’s imperative to hire a social media manager, who has the skills and experience in efficiently managing requests and complaints that come through.
Creating a process for responding to such queries, rather than dealing with them on an ad hoc basis, is the best way to build a strong reputation for your brand, both online and offline. Responding quickly and effectively to your customers will help them to feel valued, which will increase the chances of them returning as loyal customers.
In a nutshell, good customer service means that issues are dealt with quickly and calmly, always trying to find an appropriate solution for the customer.
Reputation Management
Social media is a great way to track what customers are saying about your brand. This includes the positive things! When customers are praising your services or product, you want to be able to positively respond to their comments, to establish a relationship. You may want to retweet their post, thank them for their nice words, or send them a referral link as a reward. However you choose to interact with your customers, a social media marketing manager will know how to best engage with them in a consistent and engaging brand voice.
While traditional marketing has been around far longer than social media, social media has an edge over traditional marketing, in that it allows a fluid platform for your brand to interact with your customers. That’s why it’s important to make sure you are engaging and interacting with your customers as much as possible, to make them feel included and valued.
Highlight the Human Behind the Brand
Everything we’ve spoken about so far all boils down to humanizing the brand. These days, customers don’t just expect a quality product from a brand, they expect it to have a voice, an opinion on current events, humor, personality, the works. Your brand will simply sink into the sidelines if you fail to engage with your customers on a human level. This is where social media comes in. It’s the ideal platform to show who the people are behind the brand. Your social media should highlight what your brand is motivated by and what it stands for. By showing that you care about greater causes than making money, you will be more likely to impress customers and encourage them to stay loyal to you. Also, if you show a little love to your customers, they’ll show a little love to you. If you ask your customers to engage with your content, such as sharing a post or participate in a competition, they’re far more likely to if you’ve been receptive to them!
That’s why it’s vital that you don’t just see your social media platform as a place to promote your business or advertise product launches. While it might be tempting to rely on more traditional-style adverts, social media marketing is far more than that.
Make sure the content that you’re posting is relevant, topical, inspiring, fresh, and insightful. It doesn’t necessarily need to be directly about your brand. Perhaps you want to share a particularly interesting industry statistic or a post about a cause you care about. As long as it’s relevant to your brand and the interests of your followers, then you can be as creative as you like! Find a Social Media Marketing expert.
This is where you can really incorporate your brand voice and image into your content. Do you position yourself as a humorous and light-hearted brand? Then you want to create content that’s likely to cause a giggle! It also means you can be a bit more relaxed in the way you communicate with your audience, replying with a bit of cheeky banter to a competitor’s post, for example.
Whereas if your brand is more serious, such as a charity or law firm, your messaging should reflect that. That’s not to say it needs to be all doom and gloom, but it’s important that you don’t make light of a serious situation.
Every comment, direct message, and complaint you respond to should reflect your brand and align with its image and ethos. Above all, it needs to be respectful and representative of your colleagues and the people behind the brand.
Don’t Follow the Crowd
It’s important that your brand creates a unique tone of voice that reflects what you do. There’s no point in going on a competitor’s social media page and imitating their tone of voice, this will show that you haven’t thought about your own brand identity and won’t help you to stand apart from the crowd. Take some time to establish how you want to position your brand to the public and make sure your tone of voice reflects that.
To Sum Up
Social media is without a doubt the best form of marketing to interact and build a meaningful connection with your customers. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter create a space to have conversations with customers, answer their questions and build rapport.
Social media posts should always reflect your company culture, whether that’s innovative and out there, classic and traditional, bold and outspoken, humorous, serious, the list goes on. Remember that your tone of voice needs to be consistent throughout your social media channels, as this will help your brand to be easily recognizable to customers.
A powerful social media campaign will engage with your audience through interactive content, creating a sense of customer community and loyalty. This will in turn cause customers to shout loud and proud about your brand and how brilliant you are. And guess what, that’s free marketing!
This article has been published in accordance with Socialnomics’ disclosure policy.
