As a brand you need to have a consistent voice across all social media. This can be easy when one person is taking care of your content. However, if different people are responsible for content creation in the different platforms, you might find it difficult to maintain a cohesive brand voice across all platforms. To keep your brand voice powerful while working with multiple content creators and editors, you will need to follow these simple steps and encourage your team to do the same.

Develop buyer personas

When determining your brand voice, you should ensure that it resonates with your target audience. This is necessary because your brand voice depends on your buyer’s taste and experience’s, simply put, your brand voice should resonate with your target audience. To better meet the expectations, you will need to work on researching your buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional representations of the target audience based on real data. Newberry (2020) says that a buyer persona is a detailed description of someone representing your target audience. The buyer persona data include, age, marriage status, work role, personal goals, likes, and shopping experience among others. Once this is done, you can easily have your team write content targeting the right audience. You just need to provide them with the buyer personas.

Generate a style guide

It is important to note that the language you use affects the voice of your brand. Choice of words, use of exclamation marks, abbreviations, and emoji’s does affect your brand voice. Here, the style you use will also determine the engagement you get on a post. I conducted a study on 35,647 tweets by Donald Trump and found out that his use of exclamation marks, capitalization, and abbreviations does impact engagement with his audience/followers. The use of an exclamation mark, capitalization or an emoji can change your voice or how your audience views your brand. So, simple things like adding a coma, abbreviations, or capitalization on your social media post affects your voice. The use of emoji’s, hashtags, or hashflags also will impact your voice. Your tone also plays a significant role because it determines whether you come out as in-depth, funny, or forthright. To ensure consistency in the writing style you need to develop a document outlining the tone, lingo, content, spelling, and content type you prefer. Once its generated, make sure everyone sticks to it.

Always proofread content

Your content should be perfect by the time it is being sent out to the audience. When coming up with lead generation content, your focus should be clarity. Ensure that the content is consistent and clear. You can achieve this by proofreading your content before publishing. The best way to do it is to read aloud either to yourself or to a colleague. You will be able to identifymore mistakes that way. Currently, there are social media content agencies like C180 that can help you generate, edit, and post content on multiple platforms. If you work with them, it becomes easier for you especially when you already have knowledge of who your target audience is. You can also benefit from the social media analytics software Dashboard180 that keeps you updated on your Social media performance and that of your competitors as well.

Have everyone in the company in

Although content writing and posting may be assigned to a specific person(s), you need to ensure that each and every employee understands the company’s voice. Ensure that everyone is familiar with your voice standard’s because they might be required to contribute in developing content that is directly related to their department. For instance, a sales department employee can be asked to help with website selling points content, and the sales team can help develop content with a sales approach. Ensure that your content is perfectly fit for the market and can be interpreted correctly as per the original intentions. When your social media content is misunderstood or misinterpreted, there are high chances that your social media campaigns will not succeed. Ensure that you build a strong relationship with your target audience or customers by maintaining a consistent voice. Every now and then conduct an analysis and measure how the audience is responding to your voice. In case of any unexpected turnout, revisit your voice guides like the buyer persona, and writing style to solve the problem.

We live in a world where information and misinformation are prevalent and weighted equally all too often. As human beings, we are learning how to use social media effectively to communicate and connect. At the same time, we’re drowning in abundance, complexity of choices and unfortunately, them is appropriation or misdirection of influence. Concurrently in professional realms, many leadership teams are overwhelmed with trying to keep up with the digital evolution. For many of us, social media and the accelerating pace of new devices and apps hitting the market continues to impact our work and life. Since the internet user’s associate your brand with a specific personality, you will be required to maintain that personality always. Changing your voice over and over can hurt your brand. You can easily identify if there is an issue with your voice by looking at engagement levels, if engagement falls then there is an issue. You can visit Twitterism.com to see how voice is impacted by tone, lingo, and pulse.

Reference

Newberry, C. (2020, July 15). How to create a buyer persona (Includes free persona template). Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/

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