Have you wondered why some brands stand out from the rest in terms of their social media profile? Why is their social media content so organic, appealing, and congruent with their Brand Profile? The answer is they have a social media style guide, and their content production team strictly adheres to it. This is the reason they appeal to us more than any regular brand. And we like to trust them and buy their products. So, we have listed all the information that goes into social media branding. So, you can take the maximum output from your business.
Why Social Media Guide is Important:
Social media brand guidelines are important for many factors. The number one benefit of a social media guide is the connectedness that it gives your content. Social media guides will set the parameters that your content production team will follow. In this way, the content you produce will be connected with each other. And there will not be any content that is out of context.
The next benefit that you receive from a social media profile is when you add new members to your team. Any new member of your content production can easily get an idea of the content that you require. Also, it will be easy for new members to produce content by following the guidelines.
The third benefit that you receive is the familiarity of content with your audience. Everyone knows what type of content is being produced or what to expect from your brand. This is all due to the social media guide that you have created for your brand.
Writing a social media guide can be a daunting task, but there are some tools that can help you with this. Copy Checker is a plagiarism tool, Grammarly is a writing aid, and many others are available for free.
So How to Setup a Social Media Guide?
So now we are going to discuss how to set up a social media profile. There are a number of steps that you shall take in order to set up a good social media profile. Below given are the steps involved in the social media guide.
Here are 15 steps to create your own social media style guide:
1. Decide on a tone of voice. Your tone of voice should be consistent across all of your social media accounts, and it should be appropriate for your brand. Use a plagiarism checker to find out the uniqueness of your language as well.
2. Create a style guide for visuals. This should include guidelines for colours, fonts, and images.
3. Establish guidelines for posting frequency and timing. You don’t want all of your accounts to be posting at the same time, or with the same frequency.
4. Come up with a list of approved hashtags. Make sure that all of your approved hashtags are relevant to your brand and audience.
5. Create guidelines for user-generated content. You’ll need to decide what types of user-generated content you’ll approve, and how they will be used. Plus you need to check the plagiarism through a genuine free plagiarism checker as well. We provide a free tool like copychecker.com to your content production team. The tool will help them find any plagiarism in their content which they can remove easily.
6. Establish a social media policy. This should include guidelines for acceptable behaviour on your social media accounts.
7. Define your brand voice. What is the personality of your brand? How do you want people to perceive it?
8. Create guidelines for using keywords and tagging other users. Make sure that all of your tags are relevant and add value to the conversation.
9. Decide on a strategy for monitoring and responding to comments. You’ll need to decide how you will handle negative comments, as well as how you will respond to positive ones.
10. Create guidelines for promoting your content. You’ll need to decide how often you will promote your content, and what types of content you will promote.
11. Establish a process for approving new social media accounts. This will ensure that all of your accounts are consistent with your brand standards.
12. Create guidelines for handling customer service issues on social media. You’ll need to decide how you will handle complaints and other customer service issues that arise in the media.
13. Decide on a social media crisis management plan. This should include guidelines for how you will handle negative publicity, and what you will do in the event of a major crisis.
14. Develop a process for regular review and updates. You’ll need to periodically review your style guide to make sure that it is still relevant and up-to-date.
15. Make sure that all of your employees are aware of your social media style guide. It’s important that everyone who represents your company online is familiar with your guidelines.
Conclusion:
Creating a social media style guide is an important step in ensuring that all of your social media accounts look and sound consistent. A style guide can help to create a unified voice across all of your platforms, and can also ensure that your branding is cohesive. By following these 15 steps, you can create a social media style guide that will help to keep your accounts consistent and on-brand.