How to create a strong voice for your brand on social media and beyond

The best way to produce consistent, compelling content on all channels is by developing a powerful and unique brand voice. Determining your brand’s voice makes you think about what you stand for and who you are. You also need to consider your audience and their needs.

Continue reading to learn how to create your own unique brand voice, and integrate it into your social media strategies.

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What is a brand voice?

Brand voice refers to the way a brand portrays itself through words. It’s the linguistic version of a brand’s personality. A well-defined brand voice ensures consistency in your marketing communications, helps build a relationship with your customers, and even protects your business from social media missteps.

The definition of your brand voice should start broad and then get very detailed. The broad strokes define your overall tone – such as formal, friendly, jokey, or serious. At the fine details level you might want to include specific words or phrases that should or shouldn’t be used in your brand communications.

We’ll walk you through all the steps of creating a brand voice later in this post. For now, start thinking about your brand and what you want it to represent.

Why is having a consistent brand voice important?

Why exactly does a brand voice matter? It has multiple benefits, from brand awareness to team cohesion.

Make your brand more recognizable

Just like a great brand aesthetic (a.k.a. visual identity), a solid social media brand voice makes your brand more recognizable. When people see your social media posts, they know they’re your social media posts.

In addition to creating a personality for your brand and developing an ongoing relationship with your social followers, this can actually help protect your brand from being impersonated by fake social media accounts.

When your social posts look and feel consistently like you, it’s harder for imposters to get in your way.

Give all teams a communications blueprint

Multiple teams throughout your organization create public-facing content and documents. Think about all the words produced in print or video or audio. This might include:

SalesMarketingCustomer servicePublic relationsInvestor relationsTech supportProduct documentation

While the tone might vary somewhat depending on the context, the overall language and voice should remain consistent at their core.

This is especially useful when you bring in new staff, as they can get up to speed quickly and understand how best to communicate on behalf of your brand.

A brand voice document is also incredibly helpful for anyone external who communicates on behalf of your brand, like freelancers, agencies, and content creators.

As a freelancer, I’ve written for organizations ranging from motorcycle brands to municipal governments. It’s much easier to create content that sounds “right” for the brand in the first draft if they provide me with a brand voice document.

Connect better with customers and prospects

A well-defined brand voice makes your company seem more human. And a more human brand is easier for customers, prospects, and social media followers to relate to.

Especially on social media, people don’t want to follow or engage with a random corporate entity. They want to follow and engage with brands that amuse, entertain, inform, and/or align with their values. That’s true when it comes to purchasing, too. A well-defined social media voice ensures your social content resonates with the people you want to connect with most.

void social media missteps

Unless you’re a one-person shop (in which case, we salute you!), you likely have multiple team members working on your social content.

A well-defined social media brand voice keeps those team members on the same page and helps protect your brand from social posts and comments that include inappropriate language or ideas. This is especially true when thinking about how to respond to negative comments on social media.

Guidelines for responding to negative comments and posts should be included in your brand voice documentation.

How to build a compelling brand voice

Now that you know why you need to define your brand voice, let’s look at how to make it happen.

1. Research your audience

Before you can decide how you should speak to your audience, you need to know who your audience is.

We’ve got a whole post on using social media for market research, but the short version is that you need to know what your audience thinks about you, your products, and the competition. You also need to understand where and how they communicate with each other so you can use the right messaging on the channels where they are most likely to be.

2. Define your mission

In the last step, you defined your audience. Now you need to define what you want to do for them.

When it comes to social media brand voice, this one’s a two-parter. First, you need to define the mission statement of your brand. What is your brand all about? What is it that you most want to achieve?

Next, you need to think about how that relates to your social audience. How does your mission work to improve the lives of your social followers? How do you make their lives better, easier, or more entertaining?

Working through this discussion will help you clarify the overarching message you want to convey to your audience, which in turn will help you understand the language to use when you talk to them.

3. Describe your brand personality

We often talk about creating buyer personas to help you think about your audience as real people. Once you can picture these real people in your mind, it becomes easier to craft social content that speaks to them, rather than trying to speak to everyone.

It’s also helpful to create a brand persona, complete with actual personality traits. What would your brand be like if it were a person? Would it be friendly or aloof? Funny or formal (or both)? Young and hip or established and reserved? Dig into the adjectives to fully round out this brand character.

If you’re not sure where to start, try using the Brand Personality Framework developed by professor Jennifer L. Aaker. The five elements of sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness are used by marketing departments around the world to define their brand personalities.

Source: Aaker, J. L. (1997). Dimensions of brand personality. Journal of Marketing Research 34(3): 347-356.

Align your brand persona with the personas that you have created for your audience. Your brand persona doesn’t need to match your target audience but it should reflect the attributes that they value, respect and trust.

4. Brand guidelines

A style guide is a must for every good brand. The style guide will include everything you need to know about your brand. Your style guide includes all of your brand colors, your logos and, most importantly, your language guidelines.

Here you can be very specific, defining words that should be used and those that should not. Be very specific about the words you use to describe your products, services, company and employees.

Tone is the most important factor. The tone of your description should match the brand personality that you have defined.

Include a list branded hashtags as well as guidelines on how to create new hashtags in future campaigns.

Bonus: Download a free customizable template for social media guidelines to create recommendations quickly and easily for your employees and company.

Use a social media tool such as Hootsuite if you manage multiple social media channels with a team to ensure that your brand voice is consistent across all channels. Hootsuite allows you to set up approvals, and collaborate easily on drafts of posts. This will ensure that your content is always approved and the quality of conversations with your followers are on brand.

Here are some ways Hootsuite will help you streamline your work:

Hootsuite Planner allows you to collaborate on drafts of posts and assign posting permissions to individual team members.

Hootsuite’s approval tools can help you transform your social media workflows, from “too much cooking” to “teamwork is what makes the dream work.”

5. Take into account the differences in platforms

You can (and you should!) make adjustments to the specifics of each social channel. You can (and should!) make adjustments for each social media channel.

It would seem strange to use the same words in a blog, a tweet, and an Instagram reel. It’s not logical to use the same language in a blog post, a Tweet and an Instagram Reel. The Tweet and Reel must be recognized as being from the same brand. This will be easy if you stick to your brand guidelines, even when you have to adjust for demographics and platform trends.

6. Test and tweak

Like a person’s personality, the voice of your brand can change over time as you gain new knowledge and experience. Keep an eye on social analytics as you develop your brand voice. Look for language patterns that consistently work and watch out for anything that works particularly well.

Watch out for unexpected failures. Perhaps your audience does not like the cute phrases you have added to your repertoire. You may have gone too formal or funny or casual and your audience is feeling the disconnect.

As social media channels change, so can the brand voice. As brands began to use TikTok they needed to find a way to speak to younger audiences while still adhering to their brand guidelines. Be open to testing, learning, tweaking, and testing again.

Examples of social media brand voices

Liquid Death

Andy Pearson, Liquid Death’s vice president of creative, described the brand’s voice as “a persona we write for”. Liquid Death posts on social media reflect this.

See this post on Instagram

Liquid Death shared a post on Twitter (@liquiddeath).

This is a water company. One of their main selling points is their branding, which is strongly captured by their brand voice. Consider how this voice affects perceptions of the brand in comparison to SmartWater or Evian. Could you imagine one of those brands telling their social audience to #murderyourthirst?

Let’s take a look at another brand of water…

La Croix

La Croix has a completely different tone from Liquid Death’s dark tones, with a voice that matches. BFF, Bestie, emojis and puns are all used in the captions.

See this post on Instagram

LaCroix Sparkling Water shared a post on Twitter (@lacroixwater).

See this post on Instagram

LaCroix Sparkling Water shared a post on Twitter (@lacroixwater).

See this post on Instagram

LaCroix Sparkling Water shared a post on Twitter (@lacroixwater).

Imagine these brands as real people. Liquid Death might ride a motorcycle and listen to Scandinavian metal. They may also wear leather jackets. La Croix, on the other hand, rides a fixie with streamers attached to the handlebars, listens to Scandinavian metal bands, and has a wardrobe full of neon and pastels.

According to Aaker’s framework for brand personalities, Liquid Death is bold and tough while La Croix has a cheerful, charming personality.

Customers can relate better to brands that have a voice in line with their character. This helps them develop brand loyalty and awareness.

Calm

Look at Calm’s Instagram posts and you will notice a few things.

They use bullet points and infographics to convey information without creating a large block of text.

See this post on Instagram

Calm (@calm), shared this post.

See this post on Instagram

Calm (@calm), shared this post.

If you pay attention, you will also notice that the voice and message are consistent. The posts are a mix of your older sister’s concern and an inspirational poster.

Let’s compare another mental health app brand.

Headspace

Calm posts are very different from those of Headspace. Headspace uses vibrant colors, while Calm is dominated by muted blues. Although they are both in the same market, you’d never confuse the two apps.

When you look at each brand’s voice, there are also clear differences. The two brands are both encouraging and inspiring, but their unique voices match the visual styles. Headspace has a shorter, more direct message with more emojis. The tone has become more familiar and casual.

See this post on Instagram

Headspace (@headspace), shared a post.

Whole Foods

Whole Foods’ captions are kept short, letting the images in their social media posts do the majority of the work. It’s usually just three to four words with a few emojis.

The few words used in the captions are able to effectively convey the brand voice and tone of Whole Foods. It’s light. It’s friendly. It’s friendly.

See this post on Instagram

Whole Foods Market shared a post on Twitter (@wholefoods).

See this post on Instagram

Whole Foods Market shared a post on Twitter (@wholefoods).

Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s captions are much longer, and divided up into sections by line breaks and icons. The captions are addressed directly to their audience. They use the word “you”, a lot. The use of puns, alliteration and exclamation points is a little cheeky.

While Whole Foods posts on social media to promote entire product categories, Trader Joe’s focuses more on individual products and their details.

See this post on Instagram

A post shared by @traderjoes

See this post on Instagram

A post shared by @traderjoes

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