You may love your voice, but does your audience?Are you speaking to them in a way that resonates?
Finding your voice is an important part of the social media process. It seems like this should be easy, but it is not. We all have ideas about what we want our online identities to be when we start our social networks. People usually just decide to be themselves. As a business, one generally has an idea of the business “personality”. However, Twitter and Facebook are very different kinds of networks and ask for distinct kinds of interactions. So, our personalities often adopt diverse expressions in these different networks.
However, the crafting of your personality needs to be carefully based around your objective and your audience. Although you may have an idea of who you are online, that doesn’t necessarily mean it will be what elicits the most responses from your audience, or drives the most sales.
When I first start working with a client, I take a splatter approach to posting. I experiment with a variety of posts, with different tones and content. I do this to begin establishing what their audience will respond to. Your online followers are a unique group, thus you cannot base your communications on the success or failure of someone else.
I had two separate clients who essentially shared the same audience. Client A mainly talked about his family. Client B mainly talked about controversial issues. When Client A tried to talk about controversy, it was not well received. When Client B talked about his family, he had very little interaction. The reason for this related to the branding they had done. Client A was seen as a family man and that was how his audience wanted to engage with him. Client B was thought of as a dissenter and someone who was fighting the people in power; the fact that he was a family man as well did not seem to interest his audience.
If our online personalities are a product of our branding, they can also be extremely formative to the evolution of our branding. Pay attention to what your audience responds to, because if your goal is to reach them for sales, support or awareness, you need to know what approach and tone will engage them.
