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 ;)

2018 Future Social Media Trends?

When it comes to reaching audiences, effectively distributing your content, and building a following around your brand, social media offers a wealth of possibilities.

It's where your audiences already live and engage with content, which makes it a convenient platform for brands. Its built-in analytics allow you to track and improve your efforts over time. Plus, all the free social-media tools make it easy to use and maintain an active presence.

Related Article: YOUR Social And Digital Transformation?

As you look ahead to 2018 and begin planning for ways to strengthen your social strategy, it's important to keep a pulse on trends. To help, here are six social-media trends you need to prepare for if you want to hit the ground running in 2018:

1. More robust social analytics signal more opportunity for content personalization.

Nobody likes content that's irrelevant to one's needs. This is especially true when you're interacting with a brand you know and love -- the last thing you want is a piece of generic content that doesn't offer anything unique to you as a member of that audience. In fact, nearly three out of four of us get frustrated when content isn't relevant to our interests.

Improved personalization for audiences is a major trend in content marketing, and it extends to social media, too. As social platforms evolve, their analytics tools and business-specific features will become more detailed and valuable to brands.

This kind of data means marketers will have the insights to craft better and more personalized content for their audiences. It's past time for marketers to be creating and distributing content that truly speaks to and engages audiences on a personal level; social media will help make that easier.

Related Article: Powerful Social Media Success Metrics?

2. Platform feature overlap means you'll have to be more selective.

Both Snapchat and Instagram feature timed videos and visual content, so the main points of differentiation are audience and reach.

Instagram Stories has a significantly wider reach and receives more engagement; Instagram influencers see up to 10 percent of their audience members open their Instagram Stories on a daily basis, which is more than can be said for Snapchat.

On the other hand, Snapchat continues to dominate among members of younger demographics.

As more platforms continue to offer overlapping features, brands and marketers will have to be increasingly selective about which ones they invest in. Take advantage of analytics and reporting features to identify which platforms could offer you the best return, and start there.

Related Article: The Exponential Growth of Social Media?

3. Social listening will give brands an edge to their messaging online.

Instead of just tracking what kind of content your competitors are developing or what they're sharing on social media, you should also monitor their mentions and what people are saying -- and use it as a metric to compare your performance.

"Using web monitoring, we can collect an enormous amount of data on our company and our competitors that can be used in our marketing strategy. At Brand24, our research showed that in one month, 14,000 online searches started with 'Can anyone recommend?' and about 30,000 searches started with 'Where can I buy?' About 60 percent of these questions never received responses from companies; this is a huge opportunity," says Magdalena Urbaniak, global communications manager at Brand24.

Urbaniak says monitoring these social mentions can show you what people in your shared audience like and don't like, which can give you insight into where your brand can improve. Social listening can give you valuable information about your competitors' performance and your own audience that you can use to your advantage in your content strategy.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Listening Power?

4. Video will only take a stronger place in content strategy.

Everyone and his mother knows that video content is popular and, therefore, important for brands. And as social algorithms keep updating, video will only grow more valuable for generating engagement and building your following.

In fact, in our experience at Influence & Co., videos on Facebook receive higher engagement; we see more people commenting on them, and they get more likes and more shares. Facebook's reporting features let us know how video content performs compared to our other posts, and you can't deny how good video is at engaging audiences.

Instagram's Stories feature and Snapchat's entire platform also give brands the chance to create video content and share it immediately with their followers. Obviously, video is only becoming more important. Having the ability to create that kind of content -- and the strategy to tie it to your written content for your blog and outside publications -- will be critical for brands in 2018.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Video Marketing?

5. Facebook is becoming almost entirely mobile.

By 2020, it's predicted that 59 percent of U.S. users will access Facebook through mobile exclusively, and 80 percent of the company's ad revenue already comes from mobile ads.

Facebook was one of the last social media platforms that wasn't really designed from the beginning to be on mobile.

Looking at popular apps like Instagram and Snapchat, we've seen the trend of mobile-only (or mostly mobile) social apps for a while.

Sure, mobile optimization has been an industry best practice for savvy marketers for a while, but with Facebook not far from being dominated by mobile use, brands will (finally) have no excuse for creating or distributing content that's not optimized for mobile.

Related Article: Instagram Marketing For YOUR Small Business?

6. Chatbots will make customer service faster and easier.

Instant connection and widespread internet access have conditioned us to want things yesterday or, when that's not possible, in the next five minutes. Unfortunately, I've seen this prompt a lot of brands to do one of two things: respond so quickly that mistakes are made and service quality suffers, or freeze in their tracks because they're not quite sure how to meet this demand for speed.

That's part of what makes chatbots -- especially through Facebook Messenger -- so valuable. Chatbots give you the chance to interact quickly with your audience in a way that feels personal; you can customize your brand voice and send personalized content directly to users. Maybe that's why there are at least 100,000 monthly active bots on Facebook Messenger -- and the reason two billion messages are exchanged between brands and their audiences each month. If you aren't already, 2018 might be the year to test chatbots for your business.

Guest Authored By John Hall. John is CEO and Founder of Influence & Co, Author of Top of Mind, and Expert Speaker. He's a columnist for Forbes and Inc. Follow John on Twitter.

Related Article: The Future Of Social Media?

“Social media presents so many opportunities for marketers to connect with audiences, create and distribute better content, and build their brands (and their following).

To take advantage of all that opportunity, you've got to understand that these shifts happen frequently, so staying ahead of the trends is imperative.

We're only four months away from 2018, so what are you planning for??" -John Hall

• 

  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 ;)