Social Media Style Guide for Your Brand in 2023

The need for a social media style guide is vital to represent your brand on social media. You get to define your brand’s tone, language and visual elements when creating and sharing content on social media.

What is Social Media Style Guide and How is it created?

Using social media and social media marketing is an appealing way to promote and advertise a company. All that you must do is, join a couple of social networks, post some sharp-witted content and people will crowd up to your site to buy your products and services.

Even though this is the case, you should also build an effective social media marketing strategy, a strong tool that helps guide your marketing team when interacting with potential customers online and that is where the importance of social media style guide comes in.

Difference Between Social Media Style Guide and Strategy

A social media style guide outlines the type of content you plan to use, the voice, tone, and look of the content, and how and when it is shared. Social Media Strategy should define your brand voice, detail your social media marketing goals, how you plan to meet those goals, and outline the analytics and metrics you want to use to track your results.

Social media style guide provides a set of guidelines that will create a cohesive presence for your social media team. Look at it as a set of rules that defines your overall company persona when interacting with the public on any and all forms of social media.

Social Media Guidelines for Brands

What is a brand?

An intangible concept that describes your company or organisation and its product or services, distinguishing it from other similar products or services. Your brand should be defined considering your company’s personality, qualities, and target audience.

Once you comprehend your brand voice and elucidate your brand strategy, it is time to develop your social media branding guidelines.

Brand Social media guidelines to look out for

First, let’s discuss the guidelines you want in place to form a style guide. Your brand’s defining elements should be included as part of a cohesive marketing strategy that will continue into the future. This consists of the visual content elements that are a major part of your bigger marketing strategy. It will ensure consistency through any type of content, which includes your website design, printed collateral, logo development and its use and as an overall branding effort. These elements are often referred to as a ‘corporate style guide,’ these include:

• Mission statement which sets the tone for the message you want to convey

• Whom do you want to reach and why? - Buyer persona or target audience

• The visual representation of your company is defined by brand colors.

• Brand fonts

• Imagery guidelines that convey your brand message

• Logo and its use

• Overall brand voice and tone

• A set of editorial style guidelines that will determine the style and content of a website, as well as PR and news releases. Dictate everything from website content to PR and news releases

From here, a plan or a blueprint will be used to develop a consistent voice across all social media channels, creating a cohesive presence on social media.

How to Create a Social Media Style Guide

To develop the best social media style guide, you would want to consider two aspects:

1. You would want your brand social media style guide to be general when discussing the overall look, voice, and feel of your social media content as well as how you post and follow up your content.

2. You would want to define specifics as they relate to each of the social media platforms that you choose to participate in, e.g., Facebook, Twitter, medium.com, Reddit.

Include this, to further guide and motivate your social media team:

• Successful social media style guide examples from other companies.

• Social media style guide samples that have worked for your company in the past

• If you have been making use of social media for some time, pick two or three examples of a top-notch campaign that worked well and maximized engagement or sale

Generating a Style Guide for Social Media Accounts

Social media style guide should be a working document where you can add or change things as technology changes or as social media platforms become more or less effective. You should always remember that what is posted on social media never goes away.

Your new style guide should include the following:

Brand Voice

It relates to your overall brand strategy and your social media style guide should include the voice you want to use that crystalizes your social media style and persona.

The recommended tone for a brand’s social media presence is upbeat and playful using authentic and approachable humor. Your response to comments and inquiries should be in an optimistic manner. It is important to avoid sarcastic tones and criticising other brands. Puns can be used if they are clever or timely.

Social Media Profiles

Each social media platform has a unique layout and design and the audience on each platform may differ. Once you find out the platforms you need to access, you should create profiles for each. Your social media profiles should provide details about each platform and include any useful tips for using them.

Inclusive Language Guidelines

The use of Inclusive language and ensuring accessibility are crucial in today’s society. Never upset or alienate a group of potential customers.

Post formatting

Formatting guidelines for each of your social media platforms will help you give a uniform look and an ease for content generation. For example, if you are posting something on Twitter your posts should be defined with a headline, body of text, link, and hashtag(s). On the other hand, for Instagram you may want to define the length of the comments and how many hashtags you will use.

Making a predefined content format for each type of social media will help your social media team to create content that will ensure consistency across the internet.

Grammar/Punctuation

Grammar and punctuation are equally important in a short social media post as they are in longer forms of writing for brand social media marketing. All your potential customers can see your social media post and bad grammar, or lack of appropriate punctuation can make your social media posts sloppy and will send wrong messages to the new potential customers who reads it.

Visual Guidelines

Videos are the principal form of communication on social media posts today. For example, TikTok, reels on Instagram, YouTube etc. It might be useful to have a dedicated section in style guide that specifically covers the use of visual imagery on social media. This section could provide guidelines for the types of images and videos that are acceptable to use on social media, as well as any relevant information.

Multimedia Usage

To make it easier for people to understand and follow the guidelines outlined in the visual style guide, it could be helpful to create a catalogue of imagery that includes photos, videos, graphics, and GIFs. Each type of imagery should be clearly labelled, and its intended use should be defined in a way that is easy to understand and access.

As an example:

• Define a plan for the type of media to be used on each platform.

• Choose images carefully.

• Adhere to brand guidelines for colors and fonts.

• Use appropriate formats for each platform when possible.

• To help keep their visual assets organised and easily accessible to multiple users, many companies today create an asset library.

Hashtag and Emoji Usage

To prevent team members from overusing or underusing hashtags and emojis, the visual style guide should include guidelines for its use. It is important to strike a balance and use these tools appropriately, as too many hashtags or emojis can be off-putting to readers.

Emoji usage can be defined like this:

• Place emojis at the end of a line and avoid placing them in the middle of a sentence.

• When discussing anything professional, avoid emojis.

• Use when there is limited space (such as on Twitter) to communicate information or emotion.

• Try to use friendly gestures in comments and replies.

Breaking News

You should develop a new social media marketing strategy to deal with breaking news. For example, if it is a hurricane or an earthquake that is massive and affects your community, even a simple message wishing the victims a speedy recovery can be seen as a kind gesture that humanizes your organization. Make sure that your words are genuine and heartfelt.

Competitor Posts

Good natured sparring goes on between some companies as competitors. Since these types of conversations can go wrong in a hurry, you should understand the implications before participating in it.

The Best Social Media Style Guide Practice

For creating the best social media style guide, the following considerations should be included:

How to respond to comments and questions:

Engaging with respondents on every platform is an essential part of a successful social media campaign. Answering the queries and responding to comments is a wonderful way to convert people into customers.

Legal concerns

Your social media style guide should outline how to stay within legal constraints and when not to engage with people.

Conclusion

By using social media and social media marketing you can promote and advertise your company. You should follow the social media style guidelines to properly ensure that your brand is consistently and effectively represented across all social media platforms. You could also partner with a professional digital marketing company to help you out with this.