Creating A Strong Brand Personality on Twitter

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Humanisng a Brand

Humanising a brand is a way of endearing people to your company. It’s easier said than done but worth it. Building a brand personality takes effort and finding one that suits your overall company message requires careful consideration.

Brand personality isn’t just what you say it’s about your style and how you present yourself to the world. How you interact should reflect what your brand values. If you haven’t properly considered what your brand’s voice is, then read on.

Creating An Identity

If you could describe your business in half a dozen words, what would they be? Reliable? Creative? Relaxed? Quirky? Serious? Helpful? This will help to develop your tone of voice and how you communicate. A consistent tone of voice will help your customers to get an idea of the of culture of your business. Your tone of voice is just as important as any other part of the branding process.

What’s The Tone Of Your Voice?

The style of your company will help shape the brand tone voice. Is it going to be serious and to the point? Or will you be using fun and colourful language to sell your product?

There are very few occasions when a serious tone is required, but this will depend upon the industry. There will always be an opportunity for personality and fun in your Twitter interactions. One great example of this is by @KiaUK. Dealing with a product like cars, you could be easily forgiven for thinking they would just focus on what they’re selling, instead, as a tweeting car the brand has an opportunity to be playfully provocative.

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How Do You Communicate

How you communicate with your audience is the key to building up a strong relationship. Depending on the above, your replies and tweets will fit in with the tone you’ve developed so you could give either serious replies, witty responses or a balance between the two.

BulletSocial work with Merlin to activate the #Plumpynut challenge

Merlin’s Plumpy Nut Challenge is the first ever fundraising campaign designed to leverage and engage the spirit of sharing on Twitter. It enabled Merlin to penetrate a completely fresh market of the notoriously difficult 21-35 year olds. It shattered two myths at the same time; that social media cannot be used to raise money directly and that cold fundraising can’t produce a high ROI or net income.

The campaign was based around giving Twitter a simple idea that would give them a fun, easy way to engage with a serious cause which was getting less and less media – the East Africa Food Crisis.

The proposition was simple. Put yourselves in the shoes of a malnourished child for just 1 day by eating nothing but Plumpy Nut, raise just £50, save a life. Publish great content , then tell your followers and get them to do the same.

By keeping the challenge Twitter-centric, Merlin created a highly active and engaged community of fundraisers, engendering an extremely strong ‘challenger-get-challenger’ mentality. By giving the tweeters a target, we enabled an amazingly diverse group to come together and keep working even once their challenge had been done.

Merlin and Bulletsocial seeded the campaign by identifying key Twitter influencers early on in the planning to ensure they felt they had some responsibility and ownership of making the Plumpy Nut Challenge a success. This meant they did the hard work themselves and encouraged others to do the same – creating high quality fun content, starting conversations and spreading the word as far as possible.

The Twitter tone of voice was completely changed from a formal, worthy voice to a more friendly and cheeky one – a completely new approach for charity sector.

The campaign raised £30,000 and reached over 1 million Twitter accounts.

Bulletsocial’s and Merlin’s innovation of using Twitter and empowering supporters to individually shape and spread a simple concept should be something all charities can take away from this. Ceding control is always an extremely risky thing for charities to do, but the Plumpy Nut Challenge has proved that the right messaging and management can minimise risk and allow greater engagement.