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Updated on July 30, 2024
5 min to read
Content Writer
Published July 31, 2024
The key to staying on-brand and connecting with your clients’ followers is simple: A social media style guide.
The style guide ensures that all content and interactions consistently reflect your clients’ brand identities, boosting brand awareness, recognition, and engagement.
However, a social media style guide doesn’t just pop out of nowhere.
You must understand your clients’ brands and strategies, working closely with them to create guidelines embodying their unique goals, values, and voices.
So, how do you create a strong social media style guide?
Let’s find out by diving into the tips and tricks that will help shape your clients’ social media content and engagement strategies.
A social media style guide is a document that serves as a brand’s playbook for style choices and creating consistent, engaging content across platforms.
[Must read: How to Build a Social Media Playbook (For Agencies)]
The guide outlines everything, from the visual elements, tone, voice, and key messaging to using hashtags and emojis to best represent the brand’s identity.
Think of a style guide as your go-to reference or a set of rules for keeping all your client’s social media posts and interactions professional and on-brand.
A style guide also guides how you convey your clients’ messaging, ensuring that it resonates with their audiences while reflecting their brand personalities.
Social media style guides are crucial for the following reasons.
[Must read: Outsourcing Social Media Marketing: A Guide for Agencies]
[Must read: Social Media Interaction Post Ideas This 2022]
Develop a comprehensive social media style guide with these tried and tested tips.
Create a list of all the social media accounts your clients use for their brands.
It gives you a clear view of how your clients present their brands on their social media pages, and you can check for the following:
Listing and checking your clients’ social media accounts gives you a good idea about their current branding.
Accessing and managing your client’s social profiles is quick and easy with Vista Social.
Connect your clients’ profiles and you can create and schedule posts for auto-posting through the platform’s social media publishing feature.
You can manage all your clients’ published, scheduled, and drafted posts from one content calendar.
You can also track each post’s performance with the platform’s social media analytics feature.
It includes automated report generation and scheduling options for seamless reporting.
[Must read: How to Create Automated Social Media Reports]
Determine your client’s brand voice (or refine their existing one).
Identify the tone your clients want to use for their brand or be known for, such as professional, formal, casual, funny, or cheeky.
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Follow these quick tips to help you determine and refine the best tone for your clients’ brands.
Vista Social’s AI Assistant can help you generate instant captions and taglines for your clients’ posts.
The best part?
You can use the Guided Mode to set the tone, format, and brand voice, and the AI Assistant instantly generates captions based on those.
Consider other factors that shape your clients’ brand styles, such as the content’s optimal length, hashtags and emojis, and how and where to add Calls to Action (CTAs).
Color can significantly impact how audiences perceive and recognize your clients’ brands.
That is why your clients’ style guides must have details of their branding elements, content, and social media post colors, including how and when to use them.
Using the same color scheme across social media posts helps unify your client’s brand image.
This way, followers can easily recognize their posts and brands on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social networks.
For example, Vista Social is easy to recognize because of the distinct blue color used in its branded and social media content.
Here’s the brand’s Instagram page.
And here’s Vista Social’s Facebook page.
The blue color makes it easy for audiences to associate the content with the brand.
Below are a few tips for choosing a color palette for your clients’ style guides.
Establish guidelines on formatting your clients’ social media posts to maintain quality and consistency.
Include important details, such as:
Keep all your clients’ written text, such as captions, taglines, and descriptions, consistent across their social media pages.
If possible, create a dictionary or list of terms to guide how specific words should be used in relation to your clients’ brands of industry and business-specific contexts.
Also, consider adhering to the existing style guides, such as the Chicago Manual of Style and the American Psychological Association (APA) Style.
Include guidelines for the following:
Consistently hit the mark with your posts with a well-developed social media style guide.
The style guide can help you keep your clients’ content cohesive and establish a unified voice that resonates with their target audiences and builds brand trust.
Create and publish on-brand and engaging content efficiently with Vista Social.
About the Author
Content Writer
Jimmy Rodela is a social media and content marketing consultant with over 9 years of experience, with work appearing on sites such as Business.com, Yahoo, SEMRush, and SearchEnginePeople. He specializes in social media, content marketing, SaaS, small business strategy, marketing automation, and content development.
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