Welcome to the final instalment of our 3 part series on the Golden Rules for Social Media. We’ve spoken about Community, Content - and this week, we’re focusing on CONSISTENCY.
They’re the 3 C’s of what makes for an effective digital presence: without these core principles in place, you won’t be building a rock-steady social media offering. Focus your energies on these areas and you’ll start to see some serious gains.
When we reference consistency, we’re talking about consistency in:
Messaging
Branding
Communication
Publication
Visual identity
Continued below…
Image shot & styled by Shout & Co. for Sustainablah
MESSAGING
When it comes to your messaging - i.e. WHAT you say and HOW you say it, consistency should be the number 1 priority. The way your brand shows up online is not just about the visuals - it’s about the words too.
Develop a Message Guideline for your brand if you don’t already have one in place. This guides the types of words you use, the tone you adopt (Professional and corporate / Relatable and personable etc), the way you phrase your call-to-actions, the names and descriptions of the products or services you provide, the keywords you attach to your reason for being, and perhaps even a list of words that you don’t want associated with your brand.
We have clients that have very specific views of how they want their content written and we operate within those requirements to deliver consistent messaging with each post we create for them.
BRANDING
Another way your brand needs to be consistent online is through Branding. We’ve spoken about this in our journal on Visual Consistency, so we’ll just lightly touch on branding here to complete the loop. You’ve no doubt got branding guidelines in place for your business: this is the collection of logo, colours, fonts and visual details that drive your brand’s appearance.
These guidelines need to be consistently applied to your digital platforms to ensure your customers and audiences get the same view of what your brand’s all about at every interaction: use your fonts on social media graphics, headlines on your website and the sign off on your email signature, and carry your brand colours over into your social feed so that your highlights carry your primary colour - all for example.
So whether they see you on FB, your website, email signature, business cards, they see the same branding in place.
Why is this important?
It’s the key to driving brand recognition, training your customers to know that when they see certain elements presented together, they immediately think of your brand. Let’s use McDonalds as a case study: their branding centres around the Golden Arches, the “M”, the use of red and yellow, minimalist food imagery, Ronald McDonald sitting on a bench. They’ve done an effective job at consistently applying their branding to the point where you see red and yellow on a piece of marketing material, your mind automatically jumps to: “McDonalds”.
There is significant value in strong brand equity. Ultimately, a brand is really the sum of its parts - apply them consistently and the parts become a cohesive whole.
COMMUNICATION
While “Message” is all about HOW / WHAT you say, “Communication” is really about WHEN you say it. Apply consistency to your communication strategy through responding to customer queries on a regular basis, interacting with other social media accounts daily and repeating an offer / promotion / discount / event regularly to encourage uptake.
There’s a helpful adage that says: “tell your customers, then tell them again, then tell them again”.
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Image Shot & Styled by Shout & Co. for Tigs & Boo
PUBLICATION
A great place to start with creating some consistency in your publication strategy is to look at your analytics: they’ll tell you when your audience is most likely to be online. You’ll probably find that they’re online everyday of the week, but the times differ day to day or skew towards a specific time period in the day.
Our audience for example is active throughout the week, but at a specific time each day. So we post when we do so when we know that a large chunk of our audience will be online to improve that post’s reach.
Train your audience on when to expect to see your latest post come through and apply it consistently. If you’ve been posting at 10am every day for months and suddenly switch to 8pm, your audience will probably not see that evening post because they’ve been used to having you as part of their morning social media scroll session.
Head over to Creator Studio and schedule your posts in ahead of time - this way you won’t forget, lose track of time or be otherwise occupied when a post needs to go up. Just before your post goes live, spend a little time creating stories, interacting with other users on their posts and commenting on your previous content.
VISUAL IDENTITY
Linked to the BRANDING section above (and discussed in detail in this journal), visual consistency is about bringing all the visual aspects of your brand together to create a cohesive appearance for your brand. It takes BRANDING and goes a step further to include imagery and video. And just like we’ve spoken about the principles above, it’s about applying a consistent approach to the imagery you generate for your brand.
When someone looks at the imagery on your website or social feed, it needs to make sense in the broader context of your brand: do the images link back seamlessly to your brand colours? Does it look like it all belongs to the same brand or is it disjointed and confusing? Our branding is white with warm, earthy accents - so when you look at our social media feed, our imagery (although captured for clients) sticks to that same colour palette. When we do venture out to showcase different colours, we make sure it works with our established colour palette. Images that don’t gel, don’t feature. It might sound inane and pedantic, but we understand (and value) the role that a strong, cohesive visual identity can have on brand recall.
So that’s it for our 3 part series on the Golden Rules for Social media: If you have any Digital Marketing questions, or want to know more about the principles we’ve covered in this particular series, get in touch!
And if you’re needing any help with your social media presence or imagery, book your FREE discovery call! We can help you establish a social media strategy for your brand that covers things like branding, messaging, visual identity and publication (and SO much more).
