How can you ensure your social media copy is consistent and on-brand for Copywriting?

Crafting your brand voice is like giving your brand a personality! It's all about being authentic and relatable to your audience. Remember, your brand voice should evolve with your audience's preferences and trends.

Don’t discount the importance of a lengthy style guide. Creatives often roll their eyes at TOV, type lockup/styles, lexicon, and words to avoid. But a good creative recognizes constraints breed real creativity. Create comprehensive and flexible style guides that speak the voice of the brand. Not just the social media manager. Because in the end, we want the audience to remember the brand.

Consumers expect brands to act and speak in a consistent way. A style guide is a reference tool to help you stick to the plan. It’s foundational thinking, without it brand communications fall apart.

As a writer of brand style guidelines for multinationals, I know how much time & effort go into producing a document that can guide all people interacting with the brand, to ensure continuity & consistency so you can get it right every time. Always reference these guidelines & your client will be impressed!

é essencial ter um guia de tom de voz para orientar n?o apenas os copywriters, mas todas as pessoas do time que escrevem em nome da marca. Isso inclui áreas como UX Writing, Social Media, SEO e até Customer Success. Se a sua marca ainda n?o tem um guia de tom de voz, a recomenda??o é identificar as características principais de como a marca se comunica, ou mesmo criar essas defini??es a partir de algum framework. Eu recomendo adaptar os princípios do livro Reda??o Estratégica para UX, de Torrey Podmajersky. Depois de estabelecer as guidelines da brand voice, recomendo ter um treinamento para todo o time sobre os do's and don'ts da escrita. Grave o treinamento para facilitar o onboarding de futuros membros do time.

Once you're done defining your brand voice characteristics, you need to get down and dirty with a really specific style guide. Do you sound punchy and direct with short words? Or do you give off a more sophisticated vibe with longer words? What's your average sentence length and what does that do for your TOV? How's your tempo? What pronouns do you use and when? Do you skew the rules of grammar for specific situations? How about the way you use jargon? Have you worked on a word bank? I know it sounds excessive, but the clearer your guidelines are, the more consistent your copy will be.

Templates are a powerful way to maintain brand consistency and produce social posts faster. While you can use visual templates in tools like Illustrator, Photoshop, and Canva for your design work, there are also frameworks like AIDA, PAS, PSB, and IDCA to help with writing. Of course, you can also incorporate tools Like ChatGPT and Jasper to help push past writer's block and generate copy in minutes. Using templates, tools, and frameworks will help you cut your writing time in half if not more.

Go ahead with the notion that your marketing copy won't be perfect in the first go. See your primary attempt as a bid to understand your target audience without being concerned about the copy's performance. Once you have your metrics, fine-tune the copy to meet the brief's requirements using the numbers that back it up. Here are a few questions to perfect your SM copy and make it on-brand: 1. Is your call to action clear and direct? 2. Was the visual text informative enough to tell your visitors what you wanted to convey? 3. Do you have region-specific references, if it's the demand, in your copy? 4. Is your copy an extension of the brand's personality, or a distortion of it? 5. Did your message align with the optimal posting time?

?? Hire the right people ?? As a copy and brand consultant, I’ve often been asked to write style guides or set up processes and tools for teams without a copywriter or copy-literate brand guardian on staff. To business owners and marketing leads I’d say please, please (please) don’t do this. Seriously. Even if you plan to use AI, you need at least one person on your team who ‘gets it’ to keep your tone and messaging on track, especially in social where it’s easy to lose focus. A brand book or set of guidelines is an invaluable point of reference but, based on experience, I promise it’s easier to build a strong brand with the right person/people and no guidelines, than with great guidelines and a skill gap in terms of applying them.

Consistent Messaging -Your key concept across all your social media platforms should be consistent. -You should avoid conflicting messages on your own social handles.

Your social media copy should be consistent with your homepage—the nexus of your brand. Of course, slight adjustments need to be made for social media (and each platform you use). However, when moving from your website to your social media accounts (and vice versa), it shouldn't feel like interacting with two different brands.