YOUR Social Media Brand Voice?

Creating a strong brand identity on social media involves many facets—logo, typeface, taglines and more—but one of the most important is the development of the brand voice..

When we say brand voice, we mean the authentic personality of your brand.

Ask yourself: “Who would my brand be if it was a real person? What would it sound like?” That is the voice of your brand.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Platform Persona?

Voice is the most critical aspect of defining your brand identity because it serves as a framework for your social content.

Everything from tweets to blog posts should speak seamlessly to your audience across platforms and posts. Inconsistencies can sabotage your entire social strategy.

Here are a few steps for simplifying the process of establishing your brand’s voice for social:

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 psycho-graphic information about your audience. This can help you determine how you frame your voice and content on social.

If you discover that 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.

Related Article: YOUR Audience Response Social Media?

Try Some Exercises

One of our favorites at Ignite Social Media 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 it 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? Is it 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 that future writers can refer to. Shoot for 15 to 20 statements to guide your writing.

Related Article: Tweaks To Elevate YOUR Brand?

Find Inspiration

If you are developing a brand voice on social media, you should look to inspiration from your fellow social media marketers.

There are heaps of brands that have established powerful voices on social media.

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 that 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.

Related Article: Creating Engaging Social Media Content?

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, so it’s important to outline a verbal identity. 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, it is an invaluable tool that sets your brand apart from competitors and ingratiates it into the lives of your audience. These steps will get you started on the path to building a recognizable, consistent brand voice that will resonate on social media.

Guest Authored By Stephanie Purinton. Stephanie is community management manager at social media agency Ignite Social Media. Follow Stephanie on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Brand Screenplay?

While developing a brand voice ultimately takes time and effort, it is an invaluable tool that sets your brand apart from competitors and ingratiates it into the lives of your audience.

These steps will get you started on the path to building a recognizable, consistent brand voice that will resonate on social media..

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

YOUR Business Development Social Media?

Three social media best practices for business development..

Entrepreneurs, business managers and even top CEOs all want to develop their businesses further -- expand their reach to prospective consumers and turn them into loyal customers.

Related Article: Overcoming YOUR Social Media Challenges?

While traditional media has been the go-to for decades, the dawn of social media has disrupted the way consumers buy and brands market.

When social networking burst into the scene in the early 2000s, brands and services didn’t know how to deal with it, nor did they consider it to be a successful business development tool. That, of course, has changed over the years.

The evolution of the consumer journey has led to businesses adapting to the changing times. Whether it be business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, most have acknowledged the importance of social media and its part not only in brand marketing but also in business development.

Related Article: 8 Branding Questions For YOUR Social Media Strategy?

How Significant Is Social Media For A Business?

If this is a question you’ve been asking, then prepare to be blown away. Social networking has permeated the very fabric of society -- users’ posts can help dictate trends and influence consumers’ decisions.

There were 3.3 billion active social media users as of July 2018, and almost 3.1 billion use their mobile phones and gadgets to access the platforms. As of data from the second quarter of 2018, Facebook leads all platforms with 2.23 billion monthly active users. It’s also the first platform to surpass one billion users. And just this year, Instagram also hit the one-billion-users mark, while Twitter and LinkedIn have a combined 630 million users every month.

The use of Facebook, Instagram and other platforms isn’t only for entertainment. It’s also the preferred source of product information for many users. In fact, the majority of consumers rely on social media to guide their purchase decisions to some extent, according to Gartner’s “User Survey Analysis: Consumer Marketing Using Social Network Analysis, Worldwide, 2010,” which surveyed almost 4,000 consumers in 10 key markets.

Related Article: Social Media Perception Of YOUR Brand?

A survey of 2,000 Instagram users, conducted by Dana Rebecca Design, revealed that 85% of users follow style, fashion and lifestyle accounts.

Interestingly, 72% of the respondents said they have been influenced to purchase a fashion, style or beauty item after seeing it on the platform.

Adding to that, according to Women’s Wear Daily, in August 2017, referrals accounted for almost a quarter of Nordstrom’s mobile traffic, with 79% of referrals from a single influencer network.

The same network’s influencers accounted for 21.9% of Sephora.com’s and nearly 31% of Net-a-Porter’s referral traffic.

Related Article: Why Social Media Influencers Prefer Instagram?

Social Media Best Practices

Now that we’ve established why social media is so important for business development, it’s pivotal that we also define the best practices businesses should apply to get the most out of their social media marketing strategies.

1. Use A Unique Voice

Creativity is what may separate you from the rest of the brands on social media. Whether you’re trying to attract end users or companies that will distribute your brand, you should be able to market your products in the most interesting, informative and engaging way possible.

One of the best ways to do this is by having a brand personality -- a social media voice that is unique to you.

A great example of this is Wendy’s. If you haven’t seen the fast-food chain’s Twitter account, I suggest you check it out. The brand has gone viral several times for its witty -- and, at times, borderline offensive -- tweets.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Platform Persona?

It has hit on other fast-food chains, like McDonald’s and has engaged with other Twitter users in the cleverest of ways.

You don’t have to be too controversial with your tweets, but it’s good to have a conversational tone, as this makes your brand seem more human and feel approachable.

2. Engage With Your Followers

Much like Wendy’s, engaging with users -- whether it be replying to their messages, answering queries or simply retweeting their posts -- is a good way to connect with your consumers, instead of just simply posting statuses.

Being personal with your followers also encourages them to connect with you more -- they may ask questions, tag you in posts and have short bants with your brand account. This process helps keep you at the top of mind in your market, which will help when consumers reach the purchasing stage.

Related Article: Building An Engaging Social Media Presence?

Remember, most people like brands that engage with them. Statistics have proven this, so make sure you stay connected with your prospective consumers at all times.

Engaging with your followers can also be as simple as asking them to share their photos or stories while using your own hashtag. A lot of brands have been successful with this type of campaign, much like KFC’s #NationalFriedChickenDay or Disney’s #ShareYourEars.

Cameron Poetzscher, vice president of corporate development at Uber, posted an article about the consumer journey to LinkedIn that put it like this: “Engagement is one of the most important stages in the consumer journey. The process doesn’t end with a purchase. As with any business, you want to turn a one-time buyer to a loyal customer.”

Related Article: What Other Peoples Advertising Can Teach YOU?

3. Choose The Best Platform

Just because Facebook has the most users doesn’t mean it’s the best platform for you. There are several more networking sites that will offer the same -- if not better -- reach, engagement and influence as the Mark Zuckerberg-founded platform. As a matter of fact, for B2B companies, LinkedIn is rated as the most effective.

Real estate marketing company Drawbotics was likely aware of this when it launched its marketing campaign -- 3D floor plans of popular TV shows’ workplaces. The campaign quickly gained steam and went viral online. So much so that news outlets like Business Insider took notice and published stories about it. The campaign also won LinkedIn Marketing Awards’ Most Innovative in Small Business Campaign.

For consumer goods companies, Budweiser has found success on Youtube, sharing its advertisements on the video-sharing and streaming platform. Needless to say, the beer brand seems to go viral almost every single year for its commercials.

Guest Authored By Atanu Shaw. Atanu is currently the VP (Marketing) of Roosterly and has worked with some of the biggest publishers like International Business Times(AU). Follow Atanu on Twitter.

Related Article: Marketing Strategies To Transcend YOUR Industry?

"Each platform caters to a specific demographic, but with the right research and a creative marketing strategy, you could be effectively tapping into your market in no time.." -AtanuShaw

• 

  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Overcoming YOUR Social Media Challenges?

5 Social media challenges and how to overcome them..

As a constantly evolving field, Social Media comes with varied developments in terms of algorithms, platform changes and so on. A marketer must be aware of all the advantages as well as the challenges that these changes bring.

Let’s look at 5 social media challenges, and how you can tackle them successfully.

Related Article: 7 Gary Vaynerchuk Social Media Tips?

1. Organic Reach

Every year we see organic reach dwindle away, especially for Facebook. One major reason is, social media platforms are pushing brands to adapt their advertising solutions. To tackle the issue of organic reach, you can start investing heavily in paid ads, but if it’s not feasible for you at the moment, you can adopt the following 2 strategies:

A. Choose Quality Over Quantity: Have a consistent posting frequency, but you do not need to post every blog post you publish. Post only the ace content as this would increase better engagement with organic reach.

B. Focus on the Trending Content Format: There will always be a few content formats that will be trending for a specific time period. A few years back, it was 'images'. In 2018, videos are outperforming the other formats. Therefore, use videos to get noticed in your followers’ news feed.

Related Article: YOUR Organic Social Media Marketing?

2. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a widely used strategy because it is cost-effective compared to mainstream advertising, and generates great returns on your ad spend. However, there are a few challenges that come with influencer marketing. Let’s look at 3 main challenges and how you can solve them:

A. Getting the Best Influencers for Your Brand: You need to find influencers with authority in your niche and with followers who are similar to your target audience. To find out the influencers who will bring value, use tools such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Followerwonk, Buzzsumo, and Buzzstream, to name a few.

B. Deciding the Creative Freedom: Ultimately it’s the content that resonates with your audience. You need to understand that influencers know more about their followers. Therefore, it’s beneficial to offer a certain level of creative freedom to the influencers, in terms of content. You can do it by giving a creative brief to influencers and some templates around which they can draft the copies.

Related Article: 8 Branding Questions For YOUR Social Media Strategy?

C. Measuring the Impact: Measuring ROI of digital avenues has been a perennial problem for marketers, and influencer programs are no different. To measure the results of the influencer campaign, start tracking reach, impressions, engagement, and conversions. To measure conversions, you can start giving out promo codes unique for each influencer so that you can track the performance of each individual.

3. Follower Engagement

What is the point of social media if no one is there to listen to what you have to say? Building a community on social media is a challenge. Keeping them engaged is an even bigger challenge. Remember, social media is a two-way street. Here are 3 simple ways you can boost follower engagement:

A. Ask Questions: The simplest tactic you can use is to ask questions. Ask questions to get feedback, know what your followers think about a particular trend or just about anything related to your topic. You can ask your followers to leave comments or use the in-built poll feature most platforms provide.

Related Article: Building An Engaging Social Media Presence?

B. Solve Customer Queries Promptly: Whenever a user tweets or posts on your page with a query, try to address it as quickly as possible. Doing this will build trust and encourage the user to interact with your brand more frequently.

C. Run Contests: Asking your followers to participate in a contest by tweeting with a hashtag or commenting or sharing your content by offering freebies in return is a relatively low effort activity for both, your brand and your followers to skyrocket your engagement.

4. Immersive Content Formats

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are still in a nascent stage in their marketing adaptation, but that’s where their biggest potential lies. The biggest challenge with the immersive content format is its low adoption rate. If you use Facebook you might come across Facebook 360 videos, but they too are few. Also, devices required for immersive content formats like VR headsets are still not in the trend yet. As the saying goes, “the early bird gets the worm.” The way to overcome this is to become an early adopter in the field so that when this format finally explodes, you will be there to bank on its success.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Content Planning Tools?

5. Consistent Brand Voice

Brand voice is the personality of your brand. It needs to be engaging, and it should be reflected in your content. Lack of long-term content planning is what stifles the consistency in your brand voice. Also, being unable to convey your voice through the content hampers the communication. To overcome these challenges, you need to start with having a brand guide that details your voice, tone, word usage, dos and don’ts etc.

Also, while creating content or campaign for a specific business requirement, keep the messaging constant and repeat it wherever you can to build a lasting impact.

Guest Authored By Indrajeet Deshpande. is a Marketing professional with 6+ years of experience in managing different facets of Digital Marketing. After working with SpiderG - a Pune based SaaS startup, he is now ready to work as a freelance marketer with different SaaS startups helping them with marketing strategy, plan and execution. His love for old-school hard rock and metal music culminated in taking up guitar and starting GuitarGabble.

Follow Indrajeet on Twitter.

Related Article: 8 Branding Questions For YOUR Social Media Strategy?

"Although consistency is crucial, keep your brand voice young, witty and impactful. Understand your audience well and adopt a language that echoes their thoughts, attitude, and lifestyle. Change is inevitable in social media marketing. The best way to overcome new challenges is to stick to the fundamental – content!" -IndrajeetDeshpande

• 

  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Responding To YOUR Happy Social Customers?

4 Simple ways to respond to a happy customer in social media..

One thing that emerged with the advent of social media as a viable customer service channel was that customers suddenly had a vehicle with which to deliver… compliments.

Related Article: Growing YOUR Social Media Reputation?

Despite all of the bad press about heightened complaints about brands in social media – much of it deserving – an overlooked benefit of the channel is the growing list of nice things that people have to say about their customer experience.

People share their experiences on social media based on a simple equation involving expectations and emotions. If a brand exceeds expectations, customers are happy, and their willingness to share their experience in social media is actually very high. How (or even if) a brand responds greatly contributes back to the customer experience itself.

The idea that somebody takes time out of their day to tweet at a brand or post on their Facebook page something positive about their experience is really incredible. Think about it: That never used to happen before social media became popular. A call center rarely if ever got phone calls where the agent answered the phone and the person on the line said, “I'm just calling to tell you that you did a great job!” It just didn’t happen.

Related Article: Building Trust For YOUR Social Media Brand?

So why do many brands not bother to respond to compliments on social media?

--The traditional role of “customer service” is to handle problems. A recent study by Sprout Social found that 88% of social marketers say customer service is important to their brands, but that isn’t translating to brand responsiveness to positive comments. This is most likely because responding to compliments has never been part of the customer service remit.

--Social marketers have moved on. When social media arrived on the scene, marketers quickly learned that a unique aspect of this marketing channel was that customers could actually talk back. Social media gave customers a voice, and marketers were soon out of their league trying to answer complaints. Initially, they brought in customer service to handle the questions and the negative comments, leaving the fun, positive interactions for the “community manager.” But over time, all customer interactions have moved to the contact center.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Public Relations?

--Lack of resources. Many companies are not properly resourced to handle all social media interactions, and/or social media agents are pulled off that channel in times of high call volumes. This creates stress on responding to all questions and complaints, let alone compliments.

--Compared to avoiding the public relations nightmare of a negative viral tweet, the perceived value of customer compliments is relatively low. Companies believe that fixing problems is more important than keeping happy customers happy.

When someone compliments a company publicly, it gives companies valuable feedback about what they doing right.

It is important to figure out how to do more of that so you can make more customers happy. In addition, positive comments provide that elusive word-of-mouth marketing that many brands are spending lots of money to achieve – even though it is right under their noses.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Brand Engagement Data Science?

Here’s what companies should do when someone compliments them publicly:

--Say “thank you.” This seems obvious but is so often overlooked. After all, a person has just performed an unsolicited nice gesture – telling the world about the great experience he or she had – so the least companies can do is express some gratitude. Including some personalization, like the customer’s first name, agent’s first name, or a fun related GIF will make the experience more memorable.

--Engage with the happy customer. Tell them that you appreciate them as well, ask them questions about their experience, and show some interest in them since they have shown interest in the company. Consumers today want a relationship with brands, but that relationship must go both ways.

--Share or retweet positive comments. Not only is this giving the happy customer a public badge of honor, it is sharing objective feedback about the company with others. Many studies have confirmed that consumers trust friends, family and each other more than they do brands.

--If resources are severely constrained, at least take the time to “Like” or “Favorite” positive comments. This small gesture is still appreciated by power users because they know the brand has at least seen the comment.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Empathy Technology?

Since it is so difficult and expensive to acquire new customers, keeping existing customers happy is paramount.

In social media, happy customers self-identify, making the company’s job easier. So take positive feedback for what it is – a gift – and be sure to respond in kind.

Excerpts from Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences On Social Media, available on Amazon.

Guest Authored Dan Gingess. Dan is a marketing and customer experience executive who has consistently focused on delighting customers. He is the author of “Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences On Social Media” and the co-host of the Experience This! Podcast. Hear more from Dan in his book Winning at Social Customer Care and on his podcast Experience This! Follow Dan on Twitter.

Related Article: A Customer Experience Solution For YOUR Brand?

"In social media, happy customers self-identify, making the company’s job easier. So take positive feedback for what it is – a gift – and be sure to respond in kind.." -DanGingess

• 

  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Salt Lake City, UT. where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)