How to humanise your brand on social media

Social media is fertile ground for building a relationship with your brand's customers and prospects. These platforms take up more and more of people's daily lives, and brands don't want to miss the chance to be part of that precious time.

Back in 2018, Marktest Consulting's study Os Portugueses e as Redes Sociais found that we spend an average of 1h30m of our day on social media.

To meet your company's operational goals through social media, you need to make some strategic decisions, such as how to win the attention of your brand's target audience and get them to identify with it. The best way to build a close, engaged relationship with customers and prospects on social media is by humanising your communication. In this article we explain a few things to bear in mind if you want to achieve that:

Adopt a visual identity and a tone of voice

Anyone close to us is easy to recognise, whether through their expressions, their style or the way they present themselves. Often we can even predict what they'll think about a given subject, because their personality is inseparable from them. Like people, brands should adopt an identity they can be recognised by. For brand identity, visual characteristics — explored and defined in a brand guidelines manual — matter just as much as tone of voice, the verbal identity you take on. The brand's discourse needs to be unified. Everything written in a brand's communication should be thought through strategically so that it conveys its identity and values faithfully and naturally.

Be relevant

To stand out in the whirlwind of content published on social media every day, it's important to deliver value to your brand's followers. Your brand's target audience should always be treated as demanding, analytical and discerning — an audience that only consumes and engages with information that is high quality and relevant to them. Without that pertinence, context and value in the content you publish on social media, you risk trivialising the very dialogue you're trying to establish with your followers. It's no accident that Facebook's algorithm “rewards” the pages that personal profiles interact with most. Put simply, what the platform does is show each user (first and most often) what it believes will interest them, based on the videos they've watched, the images they've opened, and their comments, shares and likes. The key, then, is to earn that interaction with content that is broad but relevant, and that captures the attention of most of your followers on each network.

Stay consistent

The identity (visual and verbal) we talked about above should be present in exactly the same way across the brand's various social networks. In different formats, yes, but with the same tone. With a good dose of originality and relevance, brands should aim to keep their identity consistent, whatever platform they're on. This applies not only to social media (where the brand is most exposed), but also to other internal and external communication channels: from the email sent to employees to the advertising poster. On social media, this needs extra care. Always remember that your brand's target audience is critical and demanding. By the same token, if the brand manages to keep this consistency in its digital communication, the audience will recognise it. There are two or three brands whose specific way of communicating makes us remember them and recognise them instantly. It's these distinctions that give brands personality and character. Much like landmark bands, writers, painters and sculptors, who are recognised by a very distinctive way of expressing their art.

Respect the space

Let's go back to the idea of dialogue. In this conversation between brand and followers, there should be a kind of “respect for the space”. On social media, quality of communication is increasingly valued over quantity. Assertiveness and relevance are gold. More than posting every day, on every network, what matters is posting when it's timely. Knowing that there isn't context for a highly successful post (that is, one with the potential to go viral) every single day, a strategic content plan is essential. You should aim to keep a certain posting frequency, without repeating information and with strong potential for interaction (the algorithms reward this kind of content). The idea is to create an interesting, productive dialogue with your brand's community.

Community management

While it may not be a good idea to post every day (especially if there's nothing to say), it is important to be available to talk whenever needed. Social media chats are open 24/7 to your brand's followers. Humanising your social media communication is largely about being available to answer questions, thank people for feedback and exchange ideas. Here it's very important to keep in mind the first point we made in this article. If your post copy addresses followers formally, it makes sense to keep the same register in chat. It's crucial that whoever manages the communities understands the brand identity well, so that responses can be natural, consistent and quick.

This is the Achilles heel of many brands. Community management can win or lose you a lot of customers. It's important to see social media — and this question of community management in particular — as a major gateway for qualified leads. This is where we can understand each follower's interest individually and point them towards the best solution your brand has to offer.

In short, it's important to remember that humanising social media means building a relationship with your brand's followers by adopting an identity. After that, the ideal is to keep the dialogue relevant, and the goals will be met naturally.

Challenge us to find a humanisation strategy for your brand's digital communication.