Over the past decade, we have seen both huge brands and small startups made blunders through their online campaigns and on social media. Some of these slip-ups, which may be easily neutralized by a quick follow-up, became a huge PR nightmare altogether, making those brands to lose serious money in the long run.
Many companies go through these embarrassing situations due to the lack of a social media style guide, and of course, a wrongly-styled social media guide. Before we delve into how to create one for your business, you need to understand the importance of one.
A social media style guide acts as a go-to for how your business behave and appear online. It is what distinguishes your brand from rivals and other businesses entirely. Basically, it’s a living, breathing document that includes your brand voice, visual guidelines, colors, and every other important detail that will be explored in this article.
A social media style guide is often confused with social media marketing strategy. While marketing strategy explores the various plans you intend to carry out to covert leads, social media style guide attempts to show how these plans should be conveyed to the targeted audience.
What makes it crucial for every business to have?
- It gives your business a unique personality
- It quickly intimates your social media team what to post and how to post them, instead of just ‘winging it’.
- It gives zero room for mistakes as your social media team will know what to post always.
So, how do you go about creating one for your business?
Identify your focus social media platform
The first step towards creating a social media style guide is to identify and consider which platform will help your business gain awareness and leads.
If you’re on a budget, you can choose to limit your engagements on 2 popular platforms like Twitter and Instagram.
Align your social media profiles across all platforms.
Arthur C. Jackson, the founder of www.besttoiletguides.com says “to create consistency and professionalism, your brand name, handles, and profile across all social media platforms must be the same.” That’s free advice right there.
Consistency is key when creating a social media style guide. Hence, your brand’s name and description of services on your business’ Facebook page, for instance, should bear a similar resemblance to your brand’s Instagram account.
Identify your brand’s voice.
Your brand’s voice and tone are what distinguishes it from a truckload of similar businesses set up online. Hence, it is necessary to maintain consistency in posting ads, tweets, posts, and call-to-action.
You need to identify which tone you which to maintain whether:
- Formal
- Educative
- Bold
- Energetic
- Cheerful
- Casual
- Political
- Sarcastic and so on.
If you identify this by looking at the past content you have published and the reception it received. Write the tone that best suits your brand. If it is simply humor, write it in your style guide as:
Voice: Playful humor. Interactions and replies must maintain an upbeat, positive and optimistic approach. Avoid sarcasm and passing snide remarks.
That way, your social media marketing team will know the tone to maintain while using your brand page.
Create posting guidelines
The way you introduce content to your audience should be different from the way others do. You can either decide to:
- Tease a product or services using a video or image
- Introduce the product using its title
- Set your video on your website to autoplay after a promotional post.
How you choose to approach them will help you determine how to engage your subscribers and followers. Take your time to write out how your business will publish and format posts, what percentage of your posts will be promotional, and what kind of content you want to be displayed.
Set graphics guidelines
Graphics are interesting tools that you can use in setting your brand’s personality and style. Maintaining a consistent graphic representation across all platforms is also important.
Below are a few things you should consider and write in your style guide:
- The logo to use
- Positioning
- Sizing
- Fonts and font colors.
Set guidelines on how to respond to in certain cases.
As your business is launched, you’ll do a lot of interactions with followers. You need to determine how to respond to the following:
- Serious questions about your product
- Complaints
- Internet trolls
- Tactical questions from rival businesses.
You must be quick and technical with each of your responses to maintain a good brand image.
Creating a social media style guide is not something that should be rushed. You should take your time and draft a comprehensive guide for your team to stick. Always remember that social media style guides should be subject to change once in a while.