Sometimes we focus on the wrong things. We tend to look for the latest trends in social media, the best formats to use, the best time to post, and the latest graphic design tools, but we forget about what’s important.
Let’s not forget that social media’s main purpose is to generate a guided conversation between our potential clients and us as a brand. It has to be guided because we want it to be about us, about what we do.
As we said in a previous post, this dialog lets us promote not only our services and products but the values and principles we want to associate with our brand. But we have to make it happen.
How do we do that? By defining the language, the tone, and the style that we plan to use in that conversation. We have to make a series of objective choices that will define all that. This is communication 101.
Do we want to be perceived as approachable or unreachable? Serious or funny? Professional or casual? We have to take into consideration all the characteristics that define us as a brand.
Why should people follow you and not your competition? What makes you different? You don’t want to be perceived as boring or as someone that doesn’t listen You want people to follow you, to talk to you, because you want to convince them.
The easiest way to do this is to create a character. Don’t worry, this character won’t show up on your social media or anything like that. It’s just a tool that will help create content with a uniform tone, style, and language.
This imaginary person, with their personality, will be who you’ll become while creating content. That way, it doesn’t matter who writes it, it will always have the same traits.
If your target audience is lawyers, you have to speak like a lawyer. If you are talking about cars, learn all the terminology and expressions that car fanatics use. You don’t have to be a petrolhead to talk like one, but if you sound fake, you will lose your audience.
Whatever you choose will affect everything you do later, like the kind of things that you will post about, the kind of images that you will use, and even the colors that you pick.
So make a plan that considers every situation. Prepare a document with all of these choices, some frequently asked questions, and their respective answers – You don’t want to sound robotic, so have some variations ready.
When you start posting, stick to your plan. Always keep the conversation on the positive side and never insult anybody. If you get negative comments, listen to them and try to help, but never delete them. Trolls are an exception, never waste your time on them.
As you can see, you can easily forget about the basic, but most important, aspects of communication. Defining this will save you a lot of future headaches. Like they say: “it takes one thousand posts to build a brand, but only one to destroy it”.
Old Dog Digital 