Social Media Style Guide for Social Media Marketers this 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. 

What you will learn

• What is a social media style guide? 
• Why creating a social media style guide is important
• 5 Tips for creating a social media style guide
• Get your posts right with a social media style guide

What is a social media style guide? 

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. 

Why creating a social media style guide is important

Social media style guides are crucial for the following reasons. 

• Ensures efficiency. A style guide speeds up content creation since you won’t need to constantly check with clients to ensure the posts match their requirements. It streamlines content creation while reducing potential miscommunication with clients or their marketing teams

[Must read: Outsourcing Social Media Marketing: A Guide for Agencies]

• Keeps everything consistent. Style guides help keep your clients’ visual content and brand voices consistent across social media platforms, making their brands easier to recognize
• Establishes the brand’s identity. A style guide ensures that all your clients’ social media posts reflect their brands’ unique personalities and values 
• Fosters trust and credibility. Social media style guides help your clients build a trustworthy and reliable brand image by keeping their messaging consistent
• Provides a reliable reference. A style guide provides a clear reference for you and everyone involved in content creation, distribution, and audience interaction, and engagement. It keeps everyone on the same page    

[Must read: Social Media Interaction Post Ideas This 2022]

5 Tips for creating a social media style guide

Develop a comprehensive social media style guide with these tried and tested tips. 

1. List all the social media accounts

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:

• The consistency in usernames and brand identity elements, such as profile photos and logos across your clients’ social channels
• The brand voice, tone, and messaging your clients use
• Your clients’ goals for each social channel
• The visual style of your clients’ posts

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]

2. Establish your brand voice

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. 

Try various tones to see what feels most natural to your clients’ brands. 

Follow these quick tips to help you determine and refine the best tone for your clients’ brands. 

• Understand your clients’ target audiences, including their demographics, communication styles, and preferences, to develop a brand tone that matches their expectations
• Ensure that your clients’ brand tones reflect their core mission and values, whether professional, empathetic, or playful
• Analyze the communication styles of your clients’ competitors to help differentiate them and make their tone unique
• Experiment with various tones and get feedback to determine what resonates best with your clients’ target audiences

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).

3. Choose a color palette

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. 

• Identify each clients’ primary and secondary colors (at least three to five) and determine which ones to feature more prominently in their content and post designs
• Consider the color proportion and set guidelines on maintaining the correct color balance to ensure consistency
• Ensure the colors reflect your clients’ brand personalities, such as soft or muted tones for a baby clothing brand and bold colors for a makeup brand

4. Set formatting guidelines

Establish guidelines on formatting your clients’ social media posts to maintain quality and consistency. 

Include important details, such as:

• The logo placement in posts
• The size, resolution, and dimensions of each post based on the social media platform where they are published 
• Spacing, font styles and sizes, and the entire post’s structure
• How links should appear in your clients’ posts (bold text, underlined, or using specific colors)

5.  Develop linguistic consistency standards

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:

• Grammar
• Punctuations
• Headline capitalization
• Dates and times
• The use of slang and internet terms

Get your posts right with a social media style guide

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.

Create your Vista Social account now.