What would happen if you switched your brand’s logo with the logo of a competitor on your brand’s social platform(s)? Would it matter? Would the presence, outside of the brand logo, be any different?

Social media requires brands to be always on, which can mean multiple team members are often involved, the brand is creating more content more often and the brand is trying to balance “being human” with working toward business objectives. It’s no surprise that it often feels like a brand’s social presence lacks consistency and has multiple personalities, or it caters to the lowest common denominator and has no personality at all.

What’s Your Voice?

Identifying your brand’s social voice gives it a POV in the social space. It provides a defined personality with how it relates to and interacts with your audience. It also defines what content your brand is likely to create and share and the language it will use to communicate it.

These are the elements that differentiate a brand in the social space. These are the characteristics that give definition and allow the brand to interact, share and behave in a way only it can. A brand can behave like a human without forcing “brand humanization.”

A voice is something consumers can forge a relationship with and develop an emotional connection. It allows a brand to communicate its values without needing to state them overtly. It’s in the brand’s look, feel and behavior.

Grey Poupon uses phrases like “Select LIKE” instead of the more common “Like this post if…” It also uses “dabble of Dijon” and “crown of kraut.” You could take away the brand logo and still have it feel like this content could only come from Grey Poupon. The topics are relevant to the brand, but they’re not just reposted to the Page. Instead, the brand’s POV comes across with subtlety in every post.

Get Everyone on the Same Page

It’s one thing to identify the need for a social voice, and it’s something completely different to create it. However, it’s imperative to put pen to paper and lay out how the brand looks, feels and sounds if you hope to align your team and maintain consistency across social media channels and team members.

The good news is you don’t have to start from scratch. Leverage your brand architecture and existing collateral and start to identify the personality traits of the brand even if they haven’t been clearly defined already.

You can also look outside the brand to other recognizable personalities like celebrities or inspirational brands. Identify their traits, the language they use and how they interact with others.

Finally, pull it all together by identifying the grammar your brand uses, the personality traits it has and the ones it does not. You can and should get as specific as whether or not your brand goes on-and-on or is short and to the point. These are the elements a team can look to when creating content on behalf of the brand.

Who Are You?

Is your brand the social media version of vanilla ice cream, or have you defined who you are and how you behave? Consumers are online to connect with personalities, not faceless corporations. Give your brand personality. Make it stand out. Be more than “just another brand with a Facebook Page.” There are enough of those already.

Being Real

The more brands become involved with social media, the more they need to start thinking about how they’re going to speak to consumers and what they’re going to say. You can’t simply upload a YouTube video or create a Fan Page and expect something valuable to get started. Brands need to commit to ongoing dialogue, and they need to do something that many aren’t used to—be real.

Brands have the ability to engage with people on a human-to-human level. Marketers have leveraged a variety of ways to engage with their consumers through social media by creating anything from deals and contests to videos and charity partnerships. Each of these has the ability to reinforce a brand’s message, but often these tactics simply don’t.

Why? They forget to be real and consider their brand’s passion, one of the core pieces that they might have in common and be able to discuss with their customers.

Your Brand’s Passion

Who is your brand? What does it care about? What is its inspiration? Successful brands started with an idea sparked by passion. Marketers tend to focus on what a brand is and tell their customers about the product or service offered, which is a great way to speak to them when using mass media. However, social media allows brands to communicate more than product attributes. They can engage consumers with conversations around shared passions.

Using Passion to Define the Topic of Conversation

Your brand’s passion should define the conversation. Talk about what makes you tick, and create a discussion around it. Sharpie created a Facebook Fan Page for discussing creativity. Zappos uses its passion of unparalleled customer service to define the conversation surrounding the brand. BrandWeek recently posted an article about Ace Hardware connecting with customers around the shared passion of simplicity. The brands successfully using social media understand what their passion is by being able to answer some important questions:

Why do our customers choose us over our competitors?
What do we do that our competitors don’t?
Why were we created and why do we exist today?

Deals, contests and other tactics can be used to help in communicating that passion, but they shouldn’t be solely relied upon, just reinforce.

A successful business begins with an idea sparked by passion. What was your spark? Tell your customers about it and start a conversation.