Establishing your accounting firm’s voice on social media should be a top priority. If your firm doesn’t have a brand guide that includes its tone of voice, now is the perfect time to create one. It doesn’t have to be a full-blown brand guide—just something that helps to establish and maintain a consistent brand voice. This will play an important role in building and differentiating your firm.
Some brand voices to consider include funny, helpful, educational, encouraging, supportive, serious, etc. Pick one that matches how your firm wants to be viewed.
Once you establish your brand voice, hammer it home in all your social media communication. If you go the educational route, you must provide relevant and useful content to your audience. Share tax law updates, deadline reminders, webinars, blogs, whitepapers, case studies—whatever you’ve got.
Tone vs. Voice
Think of your brand voice as its individual personality, whereas brand tone is how it expresses itself in each situation. If your brand voice is helpful, you can adapt the tone to be funny, empathetic, etc. when fitting.
For example, Engineered Tax Services’ voice is educational. On Halloween, I shared jokes (that at least I found funny) to our social media channels. On Twitter, I’ll be helpful at times and funny when the time is right. Yet the good majority of our posts are educational. Voice is what will make your brand consistent; tone helps you adjust to different situations.
Standing Out
Once you nail your tone of voice down, it’s time to brainstorm what you’ll post. If you have graphic design skills, or someone at your firm does who’s willing to help, adding images to posts helps you stand out. The more eye-catching, the better!
Here’s an easy exercise our marketing team has done before: Scroll through your social media channel of choice quickly, only pausing when something stands out and makes you stop scrolling. Dissect that post. Was it the graphic, emojis, video, gif, call to action, etc. that caught your eye? Take that into account when posting. You can learn a lot from this exercise.
The types of content, posting schedule, images or videos and specific campaigns you choose all will help you stand out. Creating a brand awareness campaign is also a great way to differentiate yourself from competitors. This campaign could consist of sharing weekly testimonies, employee spotlights, tax tips, etc. Whichever you choose, be sure to do it on a regular basis and think about creating a unique hashtag to go along with it. Make this something memorable so that viewers will know it’s from your firm even without seeing which account posted it.
Achieving a consistent brand voice won’t happen overnight. Establishing your tone, posting strategy and a brand awareness campaign take time to drive results. But the sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll start seeing growth!
