According to recent Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures, 60% of businesses in the UK use social media to promote their products or push their services, and for good reason. Social media offers a direct route to the target audiences that you want to sell your wares to, ensuring an easy to use platform that helps to increase brand awareness, humanise your business and establish your company as a market leader. Social media use can provide a significant boost in website traffic too, helping you generate leads and ultimately boost sales. All these benefits can be harnessed at very little cost, particularly if you are handling your own social media marketing activities in-house.
Embracing all these advantages (and more) comes down to having the right strategies in place. Once you’ve picked your social networks and found a few methods that work for you and your audience, consistency is the key to continuing to represent your brand the best way you can via your social media profiles. Having a social media style guide that each and every member of your team can follow is therefore a must, even for small businesses that only have one or two people managing their social media accounts.
Read on to discover our top tips for developing your very own social media style guide and reap the rewards of a cohesively, consistently marketed brand.
Stick to the point
Your social media style guide should be just as enthusing, engaging and informative as the content you post across your social media accounts. Style guides that are too long winded face not being followed or even read in the first place. Make sure your guide is relatable and completely relevant to your brand, writing succinctly across every point that defines your business on social media, from the use of language to the inclusion of emojis, hashtags and multimedia.
Define your brand’s voice
The voice you use to define your brand’s personality is important and should be upheld consistently by every member of your team. Whilst the tone of your voice will change from subject to subject, platform to platform, the voice used to humanise your brand and communicate with your audience should remain the same, no matter which member of staff is doing the talking.
Make attention to detail a priority
There’s nothing worse than visiting a brand’s social media page and being greeted by content littered with spelling and grammar errors. As well as being unprofessional, spelling, grammar and punctuation fails are also distracting. Make attention to detail a mainstay in your style guide to ensure your audience focuses on the social media content that should be the star of the show.
It’s not just your words that matter
As well as instilling various rules and guidelines regarding the content you’d like to cover and the language you’d like to use, your style guide should ensure consistency in formatting. How your social media content is formatted is just as defining as the words you call upon, particularly if you’re posting across different social media platforms
As always, if you want a conversation about getting help with anything you’ve read above, just let me know.