Regardless of whether you're using Twitter for personal or business reasons, you have a voice. I broke down what I feel my Twitter-voice is in my last post, but it's easy when you're the one in charge of the keyboard for your personal account. The challenge is having a consistent voice across the board for a large company/brand. Too many people tend to play a part in content creation and social interaction at the same time. The persona then gets muddled, and that's when your message can be lost.
In my professional opinion, the best approach is to establish governance, and develop guidelines for everything that is pushed out to the public via the brand handle. Know your voice, objectives, goals and purpose, and that should give you a pretty good start constructing a solid presence on the platform.
From my experience working at Fortune 500 companies within the social space, I have learned there are many components that go into the social approach. The easiest way to begin breaking down the content is into two buckets: organic content and customer care. Organic consists of anything that comes via your @handle, which your entire following (audience) can see, from marketing messages, images, articles, to RT/MT's. Customer care is the bucket that contains the one-on-one interactions, mostly between the designated reps and the public - i.e. always begins with @_____. There's another dotted-line category, though, which certain companies break off into a grouping called community management. This usually falls under the organic bucket, since someone who is very close to the brand activations and initiatives must manage this approach.
Here are a few items to keep in mind when creating a social voice:
- Content pillars
- Filters (do's and don'ts)
- Categories and specific breakdown of audience
- Platform consideration
- Imagery guidelines
The social voice document should live within a Social Playbook. Having a social playbook and setting distinct guidelines that all parts of the company need to adhere to is crucial, since the lines of communication are sometimes dissected between departments, yet they still need to align. The playbook should be a roadmap, yet can serve multiple functions. It can help onboard a new hire that will be immersed in that space, it can educate other departments (those who dotted-line or work congruently with social) and can set overall strategy and alignment which would ladder up to the goals and objectives of a #digitallyfit company.
Social is a continually evolving medium. There isn't a perfect roadmap since every corporation has a different set of priorities and goals, and figuring out how to achieve them is the fun part.
