If your brand was a person, what kind of personality do you think they would have?

Start picturing your brand this way, and it’s easy to think about other traits; the one we’re particularly interested in is voice. 

For example, what kind of language and tone would your brand use to speak to others? Would people perceive them as a playful, fun person or a serious one whose phrases sound like orders?

The language and tone of voice are the defining sound for your brand personality because this is how social media users perceive your brand. If you don’t find the personality that suits it well, social media content engagement might be low because your messages will come off as salesy and insincere. 

In this article, you’re going to read tips on:

• finding the most suitable brand personality and 
• writing branded content reflects it in the most engaging and awesome way.

How to Find Brand Personality for Content Writing

Earlier, I asked you what kind of person you imagined your brand to be, remember? 

That’s how you start defining your brand personality. It’s easy and fun. 

The basic idea is to give your brand human traits and characteristics to make it relatable on a personal level. Here’s the list of the most common characteristics (which can be combined, by the way):

• Exciting (Starbucks, Coca Cola, Nike): best for playful, unique, and modern brands.

• Sincere (Hallmark, Cadbury, Amazon): honest and real communication, best suited for family-oriented, “down-to-Earth” businesses.

• Competent (Microsoft, AT&T, Google, Apple, Mercedes): this personality focuses on generating the feeling of security, reliability, and confidence

• Rugged (Timberland, Jeep): honest, “masculine,” outdoorsy, active brands. 

If you add some personality to your branded content like that, you’ll make it easier for people to connect with you. 

But how exactly does one add brand personality to a branded content campaign? With language and tone. 

How to Define a Language and Tone 

Now that we know how you’d like customers to perceive your brand, we can move on closer to writing. Before you do that, though, there are two critical things to define: language and tone of the content. These two are immensely important for conveying your brand personality. 

Language: word choice you prefer for writing social media content (posts, comments, replies, profile info).

Tone: the general vibe that people get of your brand.

Think about how to go about these two elements and you’ll have a much better idea of how to write awesome branded content. 

Guide How to Write Branded Content for Social Media

Now, let me walk you through the process of creating a branded social media post. 

While you should keep in mind that the style of writing differs a bit between social media platforms, let’s now teach you how to write content that’s clear, audience-oriented, engaging, and reflects your brand. 

Step 1. Write The First Draft of the Message

Let’s suppose you need to write a message for a social media post. 

Start with the main idea of the message and write the first draft. Keep it short, preferably within 50 words, and try to focus on the benefits for the customer.

In this Facebook Ad below, for example, the writer uses only one sentence to maximize the chance that more people will read it when they see the post in a crowded feed. 

The message focuses on the benefit for the customer, too, to attract their attention. 

Step 2. Keep Word Limits in Mind 

While there’s no universal formula for post length for most social media networks, stay within these limits to avoid annoying people with long texts:

• Facebook: 150-200 characters
• Twitter: 70-150 characters
• Instagram: 140-150 characters
• LinkedIn: 150-200 characters.

The lengths are shorter if you’re writing ads. 

Step 3. Check if Your Audience will Understand the Message

This doesn’t mean writing the content in the language used by the target reader. If your message has the following problems, the readers will have trouble understanding it:

• Is too complex
• Is filled with keywords
• Has professional jargon and buzzwords (jargon is only acceptable for some cases in B2B industries)
• Is written in “salesy” language.

 One even such mistake dramatically increases the chance that your message will be ignored. 

Here’s a good example of a copy that beautifully conveys the message thanks to the simple and clear language. 

Using this style is your best bet for social media. Also, note the length of the copy; it’s only two lines, which is a planned technique. Since people browsing social media often experience information overload, it’s better to keep the message short. 

Once again, the formula on ideal lengths doesn’t exist, so try experimenting with different lengths and see how much traffic they bring to your site with a social analytics platform like Metricool. In the long-run, it’ll help to define the best-performing style which you can use to improve your social media marketing.

Step 4. Make Your Brand Personality Shine

Keep in mind that your social media content represents the voice of your brand. Don’t be afraid to use the tone and language to make the people feel the vibe of your brand.

Highway Robery, a clothing brand with a fun, playful and funky identity, makes it shine with content like this. Even though the message lets people know that the brand is out of stock, they do in a super positive and fun way. 

Keep your social media content consistent with your brand identity to make it more recognizable and unique. 

Step 5. Keep Brand Voice Consistent Across Social Media

To foster recognition, your content should stay true to the brand’s personality across all social media. LinkedIn might be the only exception because it’s a professional network that requires a delicate combination of informal and professional tone.

Here are tips for writing content on LinkedIn if you’d like to know more, or use online writing tools like WriteScout, Grammarly, ClassyEssay, or Hemingway to get help with keeping brand voice consistent. 

Step 6. Add Branded Hashtags

No social media content is complete without hashtags. Whether you’re writing branded content for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you need to include at least one of them. 

For example, you can write a hashtag with the name of your business, the name of the branded content campaign, or another relevant to the message. 

Here’s how Nokia does it. 

Important! Don’t overdo it with hashtags. More than three generally make posts look spammy and unprofessional. 

Pro Tip: Create a Social Media Calendar

A social media calendar is a visualization of your content strategy over a certain period of time. It helps with keeping track of what to post and when, as well as avoiding to miss posting dates and times.

It can be as simple as an online spreadsheet, but it has a profound effect on your image on social media. 

Important! Each social media has a peak engagement time when you should upload your content. See when it’s best to publish on social networks to maximize exposure to your posts. 

Over to You

The social media content you’re writing is the defining sound of your brand. It can make or break your social media marketing, so don’t underestimate the importance of writing branded content in the right way. Hopefully, this article gave you some good ideas about where to start. 

If you want more information

Marques Coleman , 12 May 2020