How To Express Your Tone Across Different Social Media Platforms
When companies or marketing teams think about the brand voice, they should be thinking about Tom Hanks – wondering why Tom Hanks? Well, for starters, it is not just about his calming personality. The glorious career of numerous blockbusters is because of the underlying fact that Tom Hanks isn’t just a regular character actor but way more than that. The moment he comes on screen, the audience feels engaged and comfortable in his presence. Though depending on the character he is playing, he makes subtle adjustments in his persona, in the core, he is still Tom Hanks, who people adore. Whether he is playing a WWII soldier or a cowboy or a man who has just discovered a beautiful mermaid, the audience loves him in the same way. Now do remember this as we move forward.
While defining a company’s or brand’s voice, marketers’ most usual and biggest challenges are the strict guidelines that can limit and constrict ideas. Like a human personality, every brand has its own personality, and it needs certain flexibility to appeal to different audiences in different places. The brand can have a core character, but it should have the space to tweak itself to convey the message in different tones. For example, your brand’s blog post and articles may sound enthusiastic and professional. Still, the Facebook content promoting the specific blog post can’t be the replica of what you posted on Instagram or LinkedIn, for that matter. You may want to make posts for Twitter and LinkedIn a bit more formal and professional while increasing the enthusiasm for Pinterest and Instagram.
How Can One Describe a Brand’s Tone of Voice?
According to experts of Eminent Digital Marketing, a brand’s tone of voice can be defined as the specific style utilized to communicate with the audience while considering the unique selection of words, emotional tone, and brand personality. The concept of the brand’s tone of voice is to standardize an approach that the brand will follow in all its communication. In this manner, the brand can have a unique style that would make it stand apart from the rest of the crowd. Now, let’s discuss how a brand’s voice tone should change on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.
Being the largest social media platform, Facebook offers an excellent opportunity for brands. This platform values nostalgia the most, giving more preference to the accessible, familiar, and a bit informal copy. The user base of Facebook is quite different from that of Twitter and Instagram as it is intergenerational. Whether you are targeting retirees over the age of 65 or Millennials, you need content that reminds them of the 90s, the golden years. During the past few years, the changes in Facebook’s algorithm have strengthened the focus on sharing memories and community connections. If you can’t utilize this strategy, another option is to use a social copy, suggesting that a bigger conversation is occurring with the audience as well. Here, different calls to action such as developing an opinion, informing yourself, and joining a debate work amazingly well. The motive is to create a buzz that you already know about the latest trend, and you are guiding the audience toward it. The Facebook audience wants to be distracted and entertained, so use the most human, punchy content and leave jargon and technicalities for other platforms.
Many social media strategists, including Eminent Digital Marketing‘s social media experts, believe that even in 2021, LinkedIn is still underexplored, underrated, and a bit weird. Experts still have apprehensions on how B2C content would work on this platform. According to Pew Research Institute, most LinkedIn users are between the age group of 30 and 49 years, with most of them living in urban areas. It would be safe to state that LinkedIn is the best bet for the brands as most of the users are looking for three things on LinkedIn: relevant and to the point information from the subject matter experts, hirable talent which is perfect for a specific job profile, and becoming a hirable candidate. So if your brand content is relevant to the searches, users would immediately connect to your brand. The brand tone for LinkedIn is very specific, as the goal is to get directly on the point while writing the copy for this platform. Though you may need a different and unique angle to attract users’ eyes, you may want to take down the casualness on LinkedIn.
Twitter, being one of its own kind, beguiles and excites social media marketers to date. Calling it the ‘address of the entire social media ecosystem’ won’t be an exaggeration. This term only emphasizes how important wit and speed in the social media copies for Twitter. For most brands, one issue with Twitter is the incapability to keep up with the latest conversations and trends. People want to know about you every second; don’t tell them what happened an hour ago as it’s the old news. Yes, it can be a bit problematic, but on the other hand, it gives marketers the perfect opportunity to experiment with the brand’s tone. The audience appreciates when you do something different such as using a daring and experimental voice, apart from playing safe. Now, this doesn’t mean that being a B2B company, you start sharing memes, but Twitter is the place where you can joke about a recent industry trend. If you have curated funny or sarcastic content at the status quo, Twitter should be the first place to share this content. It is where you can play gentle barb games with your competitors, thus showcasing that you all are peas of the same pod and believe in healthy competition. According to Eminent Digital Marketing experts, it is through Twitter that you can cut the usual noise while getting your message out in the world. Your tweet should provide the audience some valuable information or make them chuckle. They won’t follow your brand or your CEO only to see press releases.
Instagram, unlike other platforms, offers a wonderful platform to showcase B2B culture and B2C products. With visuals and overly positive content copy, you can drive brand engagement and awareness with ease. That’s why, on Instagram, it is better to stick with a tone that’s devoid of any negative tone of irony, making the platform way safer than Twitter for almost all brands. Though Instagram is still working out the technicalities of paid promotion, it is the best platform for hashtagging. In its recent survey, Sprout Social has deduced that out of 10, at least seven hashtags utilized on Instagram are branded, and around 80% of users follow at least one of these brands. And there’s more to this. Around 65% of the top-performing posts on Instagram involve a specific product. Keeping these stats in mind, it is vital that your brand tone for Instagram needs a cleverly curated copy rather than having a CTA. Moreover, it is way better to state in clear terms what you want your audience to do. Ask them to ‘swipe up’ for more information or a free trial, tag a friend from their list to enter some content, or click the ‘link in bio’ for further details.
With that being said, it is now clear that though you can have a unilateral brand’s voice of tone when it comes to promoting it via social media platforms, you need to follow each platform’s unique style and tone to reach the masses, especially your targeted audience. With the expert advice of Eminent Digital Marketing‘s social media experts, we can help you meet your social media targets while garnering optimized ROI.
I am extremely passionate about Digital Marketing and Storytelling. My articles will help you become a defined online marketer with my latest case strategies and experiments for you to implement and replicate for your PPC, SEO and Analytic strategies.
