Have you ever seen a glimpse of a billboard, glanced at a logo, or watched the first seconds of a television ad, and thought ‘I know what company that is’?
If you have, then you have witnessed exceptional branding. The ability to get your audience to recognise your company, even from the smallest amount of information, is the holy grail of brand awareness. Big brands achieve this through clever campaigns and filling the marketplace with their distinctive brand icons – an eye-catching logo, an innovative style of image composition, or a tune that gets stuck in your head.
But they also achieve it through consistency. After all, everyone knows the Nike ‘swoosh’, in use since 1971. The swirling font of the Coca-Cola logo has remained almost unchanged since 1887. Disney has also used the same font since 1937. While these companies have made big changes in their advertising and how they present themselves to the world, their core asset – their logo – has been consistent. And everyone in the world knows them.
As an author, you don’t need to develop a groundbreaking logo that will serve you for decades to come. But you do need to develop a consistent approach to your author branding, and a good place to start is your social media presence.
Your personal social media is probably a mishmash of photos and other types of images, without much consideration of colour, style, or composition. But when it comes to your author social media accounts, it’s worth putting a bit of thought into creating a consistent brand. This means making some decisions around how you want your presence to appear, and sticking to them!
The idea is that when a reader is scrolling through their Facebook timeline or Instagram feed, they will instantly recognise a post as coming from you. This will be because you have achieved a few things.
Your voice and tone are consistent across all posts
If you normally post in the first person, don’t occasionally switch to third person. If your normal tone is fun and conversational, avoid posts that sound dry and technical.
Your style is consistent
Make some decisions on things like capitalisation, spelling and punctuation. For example, will you always capitalise publication names?
Your formats look the same for each post and each platform
If you share content, do you always include your own caption? If you are announcing a new publication or event, do you always start the post with the same wording, i.e. ‘NEW PUBLICATION // Excited to announce my short story has been included…’
Your image or graphic posts have the same colours and style
If you’re sharing graphic design posts, select a colour palate of three or four key shades you like using. Keep your use of fonts consistent and avoid using too many.
Emma Hall Writes 