Are you hoping to launch a social media marketing plan for your brand? If so, you should create a social media style guide that can streamline your social media strategies for the best results.
Make sure you’re creating an effective social media presence to make the most out of your digital marketing efforts. Keep reading to learn about how to build a style guide, one step at a time. This tool can keep you and your team on track, allowing you to refer to your style guide to make the best marketing decisions for your brand.
Your Goals and Your Audeince
This first thing you’ll want to establish in your social media brand style guide is the goal or purpose of using these platforms for your company. Your goal will help determine every decision you make in creating your style guide. Your goal could be to generate leads or to build a community around your brand.
You should also work to examine your audeince to figure out how you can best reach them on social media. To establish an idea of your target audience, create a buyer persona that you can put in your style guide. This should be a fictionalized description of your ideal customer.
Include details and demographics such as age, interests, and possible needs. Clearly defining your audeince will allow you to pick the best platforms to connect with them on, and will also help you down the road when you work with targeted social media marketing.
Examine Your Platforms
If you haven’t made social media profiles for your brand yet, you’ll want to do some research to figure out what platforms will work best for your brand and your target audeince. Figure out how you will utilize these platforms differently while still keeping your branding cohesiveness. This will allow you to move forward towards how you will use your brand voice on each channel.
Brand Voice
Your brand voice is your brand’s personality, and it should be unique to your company. This element is what works to help you distinguish your brand from competitors. A consistent brand voice and identity will also help you build familiarity and recognition with your audeince.
A consistent brand voice across your platforms will allow you to avoid giving audiences mixed messages about who your company is. When developing your brand voice, consider what tone will best relate to your target audeince. You should also consider what kind of emotions you hope to convey.
Visual Guidelines
Most social media platforms are highly visible, so it’s important to narrow down what kind of visual content your brand can create. Some visual content options include photos, gifs, memes, videos, and graphics. You will want to plan out your different content types in a way that looks curated and visually pleasing.
You may also highlight other visual guidelines that can help you streamline your content, such as brand colors, fonts, and logos to keep posts visually cohesive. This will help you identify your overall brand style which can assist you when it comes to creating content.
You should also figure out the correct content sizes you will use for your visual posts. To test out some different sizes and styles, try here.
Engagement Style
Engagement with your audience is a key way to humanize your brand and show your following that you care. It can also be a great way to provide great customer service. In your style guide for social media, you will want to establish a plan for how you will manage engagement.
Figure out how your team should respond to audiences’ comments, questions, or concerns on social media. This will help to keep your team on the same page when responding to your audeince. If there are multiple team members managing your account, this will help responses stay consistent.
Create a list of custom replies that are on-brand with your company that can work as a template for your social team when responses pile up. Responding to your audience consistently helps them feel connected to your brand, allowing you to build brand loyalty.
Content Formatting
Creating a format for your content can help your employees when creating posts while keeping your content consistent. This will allow employees to know exactly how to format social media updates and links. You should identify how each post should look for each platform.
It’s important to get specific here. Consider how you will use characters such as hashtags and emojis in your social posts. You should also consider how you will format your call to actions in posts, such as inviting your followers to click a link, button, or image.
This could incentivize followers to go to your site, make a purchase with you, or sign up for your email newsletter. Including this detail in your style guide can help your team know when and how to include call to actions in certain posts.
Work to generate a list of hashtags your company uses in posts, and identify which platforms you use them on. Consider creating brand or campaign-specific hashtags to create a community of sharing around your brand.
How to Craft Your Own Social Media Style Guide
Jumping into social media marketing without a plan is a recipe for disaster. Crafting a detailed social media style guide can help you build your online presence in a way that is cohesive and recognizable. Not only will this allow you to have more digital marketing success, but it will also allow you to delegate social media tasks to multiple members of your team without losing consistency.
Are you looking for more advice on this topic? Head to the “Social Media” section of our site.
