All successful brands have a distinctive ‘personality’ – a tone of voice, style of communicating, that people associate with that company. It’s often easy to guess which company produced an advert or other piece of content even before you’ve seen the logo or heard the brand-name, because you recognize the personality. Large brands will have entire books that define their personality, and new marketing staff will be subjected to training programs to help them understand the brand’s style of communicating.
You don’t need to go that far, but it’s a good exercise to at least map out some basic guidelines:
- What kind of things should your brand post on social media?
- What are your brand’s values, or its mission?
- What makes you different from competitors?
- What style of language will it use, how formal or casual will it be?
- Will you use humor?
- What sort of things would your brand never say or do in social?
Once you’ve worked through this exercise it’s a good idea to document your answers as a set of guidelines and share them with everybody involved in creating brand communications, whether on social media or any other channels. When you’re creating content, whether it’s a tweet, an advert, an eBook, or anything else, sense checks it against your guidelines.