All the digital and social media have their place in a balanced marketing diet, but each one requires a slightly different writing style. Here’s our take on the tone of voice you should adopt online.

The overarching theme of all these points is to remember what you want to achieve, coupled with what is appropriate and possible within each channel, and shape your tone of voice accordingly.

Your website

• Tone of voice: concise, direct, informational

Your website is your online shop, office or call centre, and should therefore be all business. Information is your key aim, as well as reassuring surfers and searchers that they’ve found what they’re looking for.

Strike a tone that reflects who you are, but don’t let expressing your corporate ‘character’ get in the way of information and/or converting interest to enquiries or sales. Link out to social media presences so people can get more of a sense of who you are, if and when they want to.

Blogs

• Tone of voice: authoritative, knowledgeable, human

Your blog is where you display your smarts. Leverage your industry knowledge to write buyers’ guides, subject overviews, in-depth focus pieces and so on that are relevant to your work. Comment on industry developments too.

Write what you really think and don’t dumb it down too much – you want to come across as authoritative and knowledgeable, and it’s OK if novices don’t get every word. Don’t sell too much, but link to your website when you can. There’s room for humour if you’re sure it will work. Keep titles and headings relevant and, provided you’re on topic, SEO will take care of itself.

Article sites

• Tone of voice: helpful, inclusive, authoritative

Closely related to blogs, article sites are a great way to deploy your industry knowledge in a forum where it’s likely to generate interest, credibility and traffic. (Here’s a useful list of them.)

There is potential repurpose some blog posts as articles. Steer clear of outright self-promotion since many article sites will reject articles that are too ‘marketing’. Instead, try to offer content that genuinely has value for a broad range of readers: how-tos, hints and tips, useful lists, guides and so on.

PR sites

• Tone of voice: impartial, journalistic, factual

At PR sites, you write about your business in the third person, as if you were a journalist, usually focusing on new developments that are ‘newsworthy’.

Your tone needs to be balanced, even when the whole point of the piece is to say how great you are. Obtain quotes (e.g. from clients) to back up what you’re saying, and let them provide the enthusiasm and colour. Seek facts and figures that support your argument too. For example, you could position your latest new product or service as the response to an emerging trend.

LinkedIn

• Tone of voice: urbane, friendly, professional

LinkedIn is like an interview. It’s where you paint a picture of yourself as an individual professional. (You can also create corporate profiles.)

At LinkedIn, you’re very much ‘on duty’ – it’s the pinstripe suit of social media – but that’s not to say you can’t be friendly.

Keep the tone relatively formal, but concise – just as if answering interview questions. Keep your profile updated, connect with members of relevant groups and consider what your interests say about you. Answer questions in your area if (and only if) you can add significant value to the questioner.

Twitter

• Tone of voice: topical, immediate, irreverent

Twitter is like a chat around the watercooler. It’s the place to mix the personal and professional, with a strong emphasis on the present moment and humour.

In my opinion, you should Tweet a few interesting third-party links, a few personal links (e.g. to your blog) and a whole lot of personal observations, which can be as quirky, obscure or mysterious as you like. Some people say every Tweet should be relevant – personally, I do enjoy throwaway, impulsive and inconsequential content too, even during work time and from work contacts. But whatever you tweet, keep it clean, friendly and funny.

@EveningNews is a great example of how Twitter tone of voice can differ from the corporate tone (or, as here, the tone of a paper publication). 

Facebook

• Tone of voice: lively and friendly, but measured

Facebook is the SM equivalent of the drink after work.

Professional and personal social circles may overlap, so think carefully about what you post (particularly images). Facebook content is more persistent than Twitter, so you need to think carefully before you post. Without suppressing your personality completely, you might need to consider whether your profile is suitable for everyone who might see it.

As I write this post, I’m munching on some dry roasted peanuts. (Yes, somebody does like them.) The product is an own-brand (private label) offering from a major UK supermarket. On the back is the following copy:

Our fundamental belief is that few things in life are more important than the food you buy. Good quality is essential.

One immediate comment is that the second sentence is flabby, redundant and pretty obvious too. If it needs saying at all, it can be rolled into the first sentence (‘…than the quality of the food you buy’). But what I’d really like to focus on is the attitude or stance of the text, and what it can tell us about copywriting.

I do like healthy food as well, honest

Be relevant

Does the average dry-roasted-peanut consumer care that much about quality? I personally doubt it. We’d better give the benefit of the doubt: this text probably appears on every product line. But even if I was reading it on the back of some broccoli, or baby food, do I really care that much about the beliefs of a supermarket? Therefore:

• Write about customer benefits or don’t write at all. Otherwise you’ll just dilute the relevant messages you do have to offer.

Be believable

Who’s talking here? Who does ‘our’ refer to? The company? A company is a legal or financial construct without ‘fundamental beliefs’. Perhaps ‘our’ refers to the people who work there. Are they all together on this point? Do the checkout ladies, the drivers and the shelf-stackers all buy in? When beliefs are so fluid and so personal, can they really be shared?

The truth is that no-one really believes this kind of egotistical, self-centred ‘value statement’, or learns anything from it, or remembers it (apart from grumpy copywriters). It does almost nothing for the reader – and, as a result, for the company too. The key take-away is:

• Don’t stretch credibility. Read it out loud and see how it comes across.

Be respectful

Although ostensibly about ‘our’ beliefs, the copy is just as just about ‘you’, and the importance you attach to your food. There’s an insidiously preachy undertone. ‘Come on now, you can’t really want to eat those Wotsits. Try this couscous instead, it’s divine!’

Too proud to use actual evidence to support its position, it comes across as snooty and patronising, washing over the reader and missing a precious chance to connect with them. My advice is:

• People aren’t stupid. Don’t talk down to them.

The key to having the right copywriting attitude is simple: picture your average reader, put yourself in their position and imagine what they’d want to read. It may be very different from what you want to tell them.

The other day I noticed that the cars used by BSM (a leading UK driving school) carry this slogan:

Learn to drive

That’s right – just those three words. It seems almost too simple to be true, but if we unpack it we can see that this little sentence accomplishes four very important functions:

• It clearly defines the product (driving tuition).
• It communicates a key benefit of the product (you’ll learn to drive).
• It sets out a strong call to action, commanding the reader to act (learn to drive!)
• Through its basic, generic phrasing, it confirms BSM’s market positioning – the market leader, default option or natural choice.

Notice how this slogan respects its readers. Nobly declining to spin or sugarcoat its message, it gives customers some credit as thinkers and choosers, setting out the stall and letting them decide. Its simple, solid language makes counterparts like ‘For the road ahead’ (AA’s corporate tagline) sound pretentious and patronising. (Most effective slogans are simple, but not all simple slogans are effective.)

That magisterial BSM slogan in full

But is it really copywriting? After all, it’s ‘just’ a simple, everyday phrase. There’s nothing really there – no technique, no clever choice of words, no sophisticated appeal to the emotions, no carefully judged tone of voice. Was it even deliberately created? Did, perhaps, the designer just insert it as a placeholder until the real slogan was created?

It doesn’t matter. Great ideas are where you find them. ‘Yesterday’ came to Paul McCartney in a dream. And if this phrase did come from a copywriter, it was an exceptionally intelligent, brave and independent one. Someone who wasn’t afraid to put forward the right solution – not the one that made them look clever, sophisticated or hardworking. For their part, BSM deserve praise for setting aside corporate pride and brand insecurity so they could communicate with customers in the most direct way possible.

Achieving this kind of simplicity isn’t simple – nor is it easy, quick or straightforward. Pablo Picasso said, ‘It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.’ Often, our first ideas are convoluted and confused as we try too hard to make something special, original or arresting. Then, over time and through many revisions, we discard what isn’t needed to arrive at the essential. When the answer comes, it can seem ridiculously simple. But that’s how we know it’s right.

Your words, like your shoes, can be formal or informal - consider the impression you want to give

At university, I would sometimes help friends with their essay writing, partly because I could type and I had a typewriter (remember them?) and partly because I could write. I never had any problem getting my own ideas down on paper, although the ideas themselves were nothing special, as evidenced by my average degree. But for many of the people I knew, translating thoughts into written words was a huge challenge.

I’d often ask them to explain what they meant, and they’d reply with a perfectly clear summary of their thoughts. Then I’d suggest that they simply wrote down what they’d just said. And they would look at me blankly, or start laughing.

They were falling into the formality trap – the tendency to use jargon, long words and complex sentence construction out of a sense that the occasion demands it. Under pressure to perform, it’s tempting to reach for a tone that sounds ‘authoritative’ or ‘businesslike’. But if you’re not careful, you just end up confusing the audience – and perhaps yourself.

Do not boil or overheat as this will impair the flavour

They’ve gone now, but these words once appeared regularly on the soup tins of my youth. The usefulness of this copy depended on the reader understanding the word ‘impair’. Personally, I think that’s a big ask for the average Fine Fare customer. And why use the obscure ‘impair’ when you can use the everyday ‘spoil’? Presumably because it’s less impressive, too conversational. But who cares when there’s a risk of the customer ruining the product wrongly through wrong preparation, and never buying it again as a result?

Please enter the amount required as a multiple of £20

Once, a woman approached me near a cashpoint and asked me why she couldn’t withdraw £10. The screen was displaying these words, but the word ‘multiple’ didn’t mean a lot to her – quite understandably. Messages like this have now been replaced with something more like ‘This machine contains only £20 notes’, which is essentially what I said to explain the situation.

Often, the use of formal language is simply unthinking. The writer hasn’t stopped to consider what the audience needs. But it can also be a symptom of a kind of organisational insecurity or defensiveness – there’s a need or obligation to communicate, but a psychological incentive to stop people understanding. This is one of the key ways in which different types of work are turned into ‘professions’ – the practitioners develop a private language, or jargon, known only to them. Language is a curtain that stops outsiders seeing how the organisation works.

I recently received a letter from our local council informing me of a planning application for the ‘erection of single-storey self-contained dwelling unit’. I think this means that someone wants to build a ground-floor flat, but I can’t be sure. The effect of the language, deliberately or not, is to discourage involvement in the planning process – in theory, a social space.

The lesson for the copywriter? Use the simplest language that you can. That means short, commonly used words and short, simple sentences.