A lack of focus on a social media account leads to disorientation among its followers and scares off potential customers. On the other hand, if you have a clear plan for your social media presence, you may increase your audience and keep your current followers interested with high-quality material that fits within your brand’s criteria.
Building your whole social media advertising campaign around a set of standardised guidelines is a great place to start. Consistency and lucidity can’t exist without this essential step. Having a set of guidelines to follow will make it much easier to produce social media material that will really interest and connect with your audience.
What follows are some points to think about while drafting a style guide.
Locate Your Brand’s Voice
From the cutting humour of Twitter to the celebrity-obsessed nature of Instagram, each network has its own distinct flavour. Some have taken to personifying popular social media platforms as though they were characters from the Marvel or Disney universes.
Given the dynamic nature of digital marketing, it’s important to find a strategy to give your business a distinct voice and visual identity across a variety of channels. Your tone should connect with your target demographic and reflect the ethics of your company.
On Twitter, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, for instance, may position its marketing language as humorous, warm, inclusive, whimsical, and instructive. Ocean enthusiasts, educational institutions, and families are the intended audience for this combination of cheesy dad jokes and cute animal updates.
Finding the right tone for your business is usually a group effort. Assemble a group and have everyone contribute ideas for keywords. Keep track of the words and phrases that elicit a strong response or are used frequently. You are free to use these phrases in any promotional content you create, such as blog articles, email newsletters, or even YouTube titles and descriptions.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, the best way to define your brand in a few words is to utilise just those phrases.
Approachable \sEmpowering \sPurposeful \sQuirky
This, however, is more difficult than the average person may imagine. There’s a wide variety of adjectives to choose from. Choose these three words with care, asking yourself why you want them specifically.
Overall, consistency is key no matter what approach you use. Trust in a brand is hard to achieve without regular, reliable interactions. There is an appropriate way to offer new aesthetic choices if you plan on making a shift.
There are two possible approaches: a complete reboot, or a more subtle transition to the new system.
Integrate your various social network accounts
The next thing to do is do a thorough social media audit of your brand’s profiles.
These days, social media profiles for a certain brand may generate a surprising amount of revenue. Most firms and large enterprises utilise many kinds of social media, and they usually all work together.
No of the medium, though, your efforts should be coordinated. There should be no doubt about who they’re dealing with when they visit your social media pages.
All of your company’s social media accounts should be part of the audit. An audit of your social media accounts can tell you who’s responsible for what and what you need to do to get everything in sync.
Establishing Style Guides
Your brand’s social media style guide should take into account the varying requirements of various social media platforms in terms of layout.
If you have over 10,000 followers, you can add “swipe-up” external links to your Instagram stories, but regular Instagram users can’t click on links in posts. In contrast, Twitter lets you add tweets to threads, but only up to 280 characters at a time.
No of the specifics of any social media site, your profiles should all adhere to these standards and best practises.
restricting individual paragraphs of material to no more than three or four phrases
Jumping right to the meat of the matter in the first phrase
Software programmes like bit.ly are used to shorten URLs.
Using hashtags and mentions correctly and in context.
Using two or three hashtags is sufficient on LinkedIn, for instance.
Make your content more engaging by include appropriate photos.
Developing Policies for the Media
The medium should be specified in a good social media guide. The media might be anything from a link to a movie, audio file, infographic, or picture that can be used on any given platform.
When deciding what to publish on your brand’s Instagram account, for instance, you’ll need to divide your material across your feed and IG Stories.
Creating a playbook for emergency situations
In what ways does your company engage with its competitors and their respective clients on various social media platforms? How do you handle these opportunities to increase participation?
If your company operates in a crowded market, customers may “push” you to connect with competitors by tagging both brands in the same post.