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Getting the Right Tone of Voice for Your Social Media

Knowing which tone to use on which social media platform is a key element in managing a successful campaign. Using the wrong tone on a platform can lead to results that aren’t as stellar, whereas if you used the right tone on the right platform you could drive additional leads to your business.

If you’re posting the same thing in the same voice on all social media platforms, why would anyone follow you on more than one media? Each platform has a specific voice and audience, so knowing which platforms your business needs to be on is an important step in building a social media campaign. As a business owner, you want to ensure that the people looking for you online, and on social media, are being presented with the side of your business that they want to see. For example, are you using LinkedIn to market? Then you need to have a more professional voice and focus on your business itself, not to be confused with Instagram where the voice is more free-spirited and laid back. Identifying the proper voice is a combination of several factors including platform, business, and target audience.

Know Who You Are

It’s important to know what kind of personality and persona your brand should be taking online. Think about what kind of traits would describe your business if it were an individual. Restaurant? Try coming across as friendly, inviting, fun-loving, and charismatic. Your tone on social media can be shaped by the persona you give your business.

How to Create an Online Voice for Social Media
  • Use similar language to how you talk in day-to-day conversation
  • Write to your readers, not at them
  • Know what makes your business different from your competitors
  • Engage with your audience, make them feel that you genuinely care
  • Understand your business’s persona and how it would interact with each platform
Understand the Difference

One could use the same voice across all social media platforms. However, you are unlikely to see the results you want when compared to assigning a voice to each platform. While the voice a business uses may be similar across multiple platforms, there are small but important variations that occur to make sure that the correct audience is being served on each platform.

Finding Your Best Brand Voice on Social Media Platforms
Best Tone of Voice for LinkedIn
  • Characteristics: Clear, Concise, Informative, Professional, Expert
  • Provide that professional, experienced tone that users expect
Best Tone of Voice for Facebook
  • Characteristics: Friendly, Human, Casual, Conversational, Engaging, Community-based
  • Take a more friendly and conversational tone while still providing experienced opinion
Best Tone of Voice for Instagram
  • Characteristics: Fun, Playful, Exciting, Charismatic, Adventurous, Confident
  • Utilize an adventurous, outgoing tone to appeal to users
Best Tone of Voice for YouTube
  • Characteristics: Positive, Motivating, Engaging, Helpful, Genuine
  • Be natural and authentic in your presentation while using content to answer potential questions
Best Tone of Voice for Twitter
  • Characteristics: Witty, Fun, Personable, Responsive, Receptive, Informative
  • Come across as approachable to encourage consumers to interact with your brand

It is important to remember that while these characteristics and voice tones are effective on each platform, understanding the identity of your business helps you better adapt how your business should approach social media. Your voice also helps guide the type of content that you put out on each platform to strengthen your reach and engagement. These are only general rules of thumb and being adaptive to each platform is important for the long-term health of your social media campaign.

Constructing an effective and consistent brand personality can be a harrowing task, but it in the long run, it is rewarding and ultimately beneficial for your business. An experienced Social Media Coordinator can take the persona and brand voice that a business wants to portray online and turn it into a reality to generate real connections (and leads!) with a target audience.

Developing your business’s voice online is just one part of creating a comprehensive strategy to increase brand awareness and engagement. A dedicated social media coordinator works with you to help create a strategic plan for your business’s online presence. For help in creating this plan, reach out to us at (707) 743-3714 or fill out this form.

This blog is part of WSI’s Smart Marketing Guide to Social Media. [Click here] to view the complete guide.

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Text vs. Images vs. Video – Which Drives More Engagement?

Knowing which medium can reach the maximum number of impressions on social media and generate the largest amount of audience engagement can help increase the impact of a social media marketing strategy. Depending on your industry, there will be a method of content that gets your desired results between text, images, or videos. Let’s dive in!

Understanding the impact and desired effects of the content you create plays a key role in knowing which kind of content to promote. This, combined with the platform, creates the recipe for content generation that your business should utilize. The decision between text and visual content is key.

Text
  • Promotes a quicker site load speed
  • Is able to reach a wider audience and be more easily understood
  • Strengthens site SEO as Google can parse through text-based content to catalog sites
  • Is a driving force to turn audience members into top-of-funnel leads

Tried-and-true, textual content has been a foundation of SEO for years. It is the cleanest method to convey information in a widely understandable way. However, while it is clear, it is not the most visually appealing way to present information.

Images
  • More appealing, easier to understand, and tend to be viewed by more people
  • Favored by younger generations
  • More likely to be shared by consumers

In an ever-evolving, rapid-paced world, picture-based content is easier for consumers to digest and takes less time than reading a blog or text paragraph. Additionally, visual content draws eyes to it when presented on a page that is full of text. In short, it is more interesting and potentially more engaging than textual content.

Video
  • Promotes higher levels of audience engagement
  • Can lead to longer periods of audience engagement
  • Can present more information in a relatively shorter period of time

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth millions. Video presents the largest opportunity for audience engagement and simultaneously comes with the highest impact as consumers are more likely to listen to a short snippet or clip than read a post. By utilizing transcripts, Google’s algorithms can also read and index the video to generate SEO power. Of course, we cannot talk about video without also including voice. To find out how voice search is impacting SEO, and Google at large, click here.

The question is not so much about picking textual or visual elements, but rather which combination of these elements will create the strongest social media campaign. An experienced Social Media Coordinator can be key in developing a strategy that employs the right amount of textual and visual elements to drive audience engagement.

How to Select the Best Content Method for Each Social Media Platform

When it comes to deciding which mixture of content is going to get your business the best results on social media, it all comes down to knowing what your audience is looking for. This is largely decided by what platform[Links back to top 5 overview blog]you are targeting.

Which Content Works Best on LinkedIn and Facebook?

For LinkedIn and Facebook, you should be expecting a similar mixture in terms of video-, text-, and image-based content. The true differences between content on the two platforms comes from the difference between the voices a business chooses to use on those sites.

Which Content Works Best on Instagram?

Instagram tailors largely towards images as the mainstay of the site. However, video has also become a large part of a consumers Instagram experience. With these two thoughts in mind, businesses seeking to utilize Instagram should focus on image and video as its main methods of content delivery.

Which Content Works Best on YouTube?

YouTube focuses almost entirely on video. Due to this, text- and image-based content have a lackluster effect. After all, YouTube is a video sharing site and a text post or image slideshow isn’t going to get the results a business wants.

Which Content Works Best on Twitter?

Twitter is largely text-based. As such, businesses should aim to utilize text to its fullest. However, images and gifs also have its place on the site as well as short (less than 30 second) videos.

Strong Content Resonates With Your Audience

Each of these platforms has what we might call a “preferred content method”. That is to say, each of these platforms has one specific method of content delivery that it is known for. This doesn’t bar other types of content from being used on those sites, but it is something that one needs to keep in mind.

Being in touch with what the user is expecting to get from their social media is key to driving engagement, leads, and conversions. By making sure your content is provided to your target audience in a timely, reliable, and consistent manner your business is ensuring a strong foothold in your desired customer’s social media experience.

 

Determining what kind of content to put out across each platform for your business can prove tricky, but the process is made much easier with the help of a social media coordinator. For help getting your business’s social media presence started on the right foot call us at (707) 843-3714 or fill out this form.

 

This blog is part of WSI’s Smart Marketing Guide to Social Media. [Click here] to view the complete guide.