Having many people involved with social media for your company can be really beneficial in terms of spreading the work load, as well as being more responsive to customers. However, with multiple people, it may also be difficult to maintain a consistent branding with different voices and styles. Besides having brand guidelines, creating a social media persona can make it easier for those involved to understand how the company brand should sound and act online.
Understanding Your Social Media Persona
Marketers are familiar with creating a brand persona since it’s often done while creating strategies and advertising campaigns. A brand persona is the set of guidelines for how your brand should sound and act. Your social media persona should be closely tied to your brand persona, but may differ slightly in terms of what’s appropriate to each audience and community. For example, what’s appropriate for your audience on Facebook, if it’s more casual and fun-loving, may not work on LinkedIn which tends to be more professional.
Voice of Social Media Persona
It may help to think of the brand persona in terms of an actual person, complete with a story or biography. Think about ways to communicate the brand persona so that it’s understood by everyone in the company (so it’s more likely to be followed). When thinking about a persona, think about adjectives that would describe how they act and talk. Zappos, for example, has a persona of being friendly, helpful, playful, fun and sometimes a bit silly.
Using a Social Media Persona
When you go to implement a social media persona, it may be helpful to think of acting. Actors and actresses play roles, each of which has it’s own voice, needs, language, character, etc. Create some examples of social media communications that are appropriate for each of the communities where you’re engaged, so that anyone involved understands what’s expected. While a persona is helpful for brand consistency, don’t get so tied up in the wording of communications that everyone feels too restricted by guidelines.
Do you have any examples of brands that have used a social media persona effectively?
(photo by Ben Fredericson (xjrlokix), on Flickr)