The Playbook for Creating Your Social Playbook
Coherence and clarity on social media will help you stick out, giving you an edge over the competitors and their muddled profiles. (AKA not sounding like every other brand online.) A social playbook is the easiest way to define tone, style, and goals (because “just post something” isn’t a strategy), and it’s a solid way to secure your brand’s social footprint no matter who is running the plays. A content strategy that’s well-defined and easily replicated is going to yield results that empower creatives and impress execs without breaking a sweat (even the exec who just discovered Reels last week.)
What Is a Social Media Playbook and Why Does Your Brand Need One?
A social media playbook is a set of guidelines similar to brand guidelines, consolidating visual guides, tone of voice, and technical dos and don’ts that allow your big pretty brand identity that you paid so much for to translate to social media in a way that sacrifices neither brand integrity nor social reach. Simply put, it’s a way to keep your content in perfect alignment with your broader brand goals.
How Does a Social Media Playbook Define and Protect Brand Voice Across Channels?
The audiences on TikTok, Instagram, and X might be wildly different groups of people who live on totally different planets, and all 3 of them might be different audiences than the people tapped into your more traditional marketing channels. Producing huge TV spots doesn’t prepare you for the comments section. A social media playbook will keep your content consistent across all the different digital languages it has to speak by establishing a voice and rulebook that make sense to your followers, no matter where they might be viewing you from, or how fast they’re scrolling.
Why Is Brand Voice Consistency Critical for Social Media Growth and Engagement?
Think of the best brands you follow. Do they have the kind of content that you can recognize without even needing to see the name on the account? The best brand voices on social media are the ones that you can hear above the noise, and they often attract large audiences with their clearer messages (isn’t that funny how that works?) A social media playbook can help you keep brand voice consistent, allowing for larger follower counts and more consistent engagement. Your voice should be able to survive any intern or agency handoff.
IF YOU TRY EVERYTHING, THEN YOU’LL BE GOOD AT NOTHING.
How Do Social Media Playbooks Improve Content Strategy and Execution?
At a certain point, trying everything becomes synonymous with having nothing to say. (Harsh, but true.) Experimentation without guardrails or learning from those experiments leaves brands unfocused and unsure of what their goals are. Too many brands are operating from a place of brand confusion, with their social media presence not laddering back to their larger brand goals, instead just floating through the social media cosmos like that guy in 2001: A Space Odyssey (spoiler alert, I guess).
Social playbooks turn abstract branding concepts into actionable steps and methods for brands, agencies, and creators, ensuring that the brand voice and identity are strong and clear across all social platforms.
Can a Social Media Playbook Help Align Internal Teams and External Agencies?
Life is better when we all live in harmony (or at least on the same Slack thread), and it’s no different in the relationship between internal marketing teams and social media agencies. Setting definite ground rules and established dos and don’ts leads to better conversations, less confusion over why content looks the way it does, and (ideally) no hard feelings when things get cut to fit performance goals; it also prevents useless conversations about the tone of voice on a caption for the 13th time. When accurately measured performance and reasonable feedback is integrated instead of ignored, creative teams are encouraged to thrive instead of expected to work magic on zero direction and a two-hour turnaround.
How Do You Build a Social Media Playbook That Adapts Without Losing Brand Identity?
Hopping on trends and cultural momentum is necessary, and having a social media playbook means you can build in flexibility that flexes with your brand voice rather than against it.
V8 Energy needed a new set of plans— influencer content was scatterbrained, posts were different tones, and much of the UGC was flat and inconsistent, failing to meet the brand’s larger energetic voice. A social refresh was needed to help pull the tone closer to the brand’s goal of vibrant mindfulness, but it needed to make sense to the client and the content creators. The social playbook we created for them took broad ideas about tone of voice and brand persona and translated them into actionable steps: easy visual guidelines, tips and tricks for content creation, color palettes, ground rules for text and captioning, and a crash course in brand voice. We like to think every creator who’s worked with us on the brand came away with a PhD in social media tone of voice.
Pretty soon, we were able to branch into both lower and higher fidelity content without losing our consistent voice – and we saw an over 400% growth in high-value engagements along the way. Turns out consistency works.
What Should Be Included in a High-Performing Social Media Playbook?
Like most things in life, there’s never one set answer for all people at all times (annoying, we know), but several common-sense ideas apply when constructing social media playbooks that knock it out of the park.
You likely need these components to help get you started:
- Tone of voice. How does the high-minded brand voice you have translate into a less literary medium? AKA how to not sound like a press release.
- Visual style. How do you make UGC content without sacrificing your high-quality visual goals? It should feel authentic, not accidental.
- Dos and Don’ts. What are the things your content creators should be doing and avoiding? This guarantees that “on-brand” isn’t open to interpretation.
These are all good ways to start thinking about how to take your high-level brand ideas and values and make them legible in a fast moving social media landscape where attention spans are… generous at best. Once you’ve answered those questions, you’ll probably need a bit more detail. Here’s 3 more in-depth insights we always recommend when considering your social media playbook strategy:
- Set ground rules for creators. Everybody’s so creative! But you need a framework, and sometimes you need to give creators guardrails. They’re here to create content, not the entire brand system (that’s your job), and a lack of clarity means they can’t deliver their best work. A hard set of Dos and Don’ts allows the creative team to make good choices without the need for constant double checking.
- Make it easy to understand. Nobody you work with is dumb, but there’s marketing jargon and lingo that might not translate to everyone who works with you. Keep your playbooks readable, actionable, and pleasing to the eye; it’s a content creation guide, not a safety manual in a hospital. No one's gonna read a 40-page playbook. Honestly, with the way attention spans are going, we're surprised you're still reading this!
- Specificity is your friend. Don’t be afraid to get a little granular, but don’t sweat the small stuff if it’s not relevant to your brand. Do you feel compelled to create hard limits around sonic branding for social? That’s great! You know your brand better than anyone else, and it can help set you apart from the competition to have a specialization in a lane that the others don’t have. If you make content that’s more exploratory in style, spend less time on narrow style guidelines than you do on setting limits around tone so that you can keep disparate content feeding the same brand narratives.
A social media playbook will give you solid ground to stand on, allowing your content and your creative team to be more effortlessly effective in your quest to defeat the scourge of boring and unaligned content — that’s the real final boss.
