Blogging 101: Finding your Tone of Voice

One thing that can really differentiate a blogger is their Tone of Voice on their blog but also across social media. Many brands use Tone of Voice documents to ensure they have a unified voice across all platforms, and blogging is similar. In the same way that your imagery and logos “match” across all platforms, so should your copy.

What is Tone of Voice?

Tone of Voice (TOV) is how your blog talks when communicating to your readers. If your TOV is vastly shifting between posts or on different platforms it can send subconscious red flags to your readers that you’re untrustworthy or not being honest. For example, many bloggers have been caught out for plagiarism because they’ve got the same TOV as the original post, but it’s so different to the other ones.

Why do you need a Tone of Voice?

Your blog’s TOV should reflect you and your values, but also be reflective of your audience. Creating a tone of voice shouldn’t be changing everything you are, it should be taking what you are and catering it to the audience. For example, you may want your blog to be family friendly, therefore you would cater your language and tone to not include explicit language.

Who is your Tone of Voice for?

The first step you need to take is to understand your audience. If you already have a blog and google analytics set up, then you can use this to your advantage. If you’re just starting out, try to create your ideal (but realistic) audience by looking at bloggers who have inspired you.

1. Who – Look at key demographic data like age and gender, this can tell you basic information about the kind of language you could use. Also look at where your audience is based, the UK and USA both speak English, but there’s subtle differences in how you can talk to them.
2. What – Figure out what your audience likes. What are their interests? Likes? Dislikes? Do they use particular language? (example: using Kardashian terms, using local slang etc.)
3. When – When are your audience going to be reading your content? Use in-built social media tools to see best times of day for you and use analytics to see when people are reading your content. (Don’t forget to match this to your country data! Are people reading late at night in the UK or throughout the day in America?).
4. Where – Where is your audience spending its time online? What social channels are most popular? Do they spend most of their time online?
5. Why – The why is much harder to figure out – why do they read your blog?

Matching your Tone of Voice to your Brand

Once you know who your audience is you can start thinking about your brand. I’ve talked about creating a ‘Brand’ out of your blog before, and this can really help cater everything you create. TOV is fundamentally linked to the brand that your blog is, whether you’ve created a brand and TOV purposefully or it just happened. For example, there’s some bloggers who create negative sentiment content on social media all the time – they may not be meaning to do this, but that adds the trait of being negative to their overall brand. So thinking about what you’re writing and how your write it, can really help avoid possible situations where you’re linked to a bad trait.  

First up for a TOV exercise is to write down your brands key traits. These key traits should match your own values and ideals as well as your mission for your blog. Some traits could be:

• Positive
• Friendly
• Passionate
• Sustainable
• Authentic
• Familiar
• Straightforward
• Traditional

Choose the key traits you want to put forward to your readers at every touch point – and then expand on these traits. How could these traits be communicated to your audience? Are they going to come across that way?

So, for example, I want Uptown Oracle to be Authentic. Therefore, I want my communication to be honest and genuine – which works well in review posts, but also posts like this one. I want to be a credible source that your guys can trust when I’m giving your information, therefore I try to give additional info and examples where necessary. On top of being Authentic, I want to be Friendly and Straightforward. As a result, for all my Authentic communication I also try to keep it simple and easy to read – whilst my tone is more casual and friendly. I don’t want to sound like a textbook, and my Tone of Voice actually matches how I speak to my friends in real life.

Writing down how you want your TOV to be and why can really help you develop your own voice. It also gives you guidelines to look back on if you start to stray from it. That’s not to say you can’t change your tone of voice over time – if you’ve had your blog for years, you’re probably naturally changing how you talk on it. But, purposefully setting how you’ve changed can help if you’re feeling lost or mis-matched to your content.  

Matching Your Tone of Voice to the Platform

Whilst your TOV should be used across all platforms, there are some key differences between platforms which you may need to alter it for. This doesn’t mean shifting it completely – it just means that on different platforms there are different guidelines (like character limits) and also different reasons why people use them.

Twitter has a character limit, so you need your copy to be shorter and snappier but still somehow portray your brand personality. Remember you can use images, GIFs and videos to help you on Twitter and don’t forget the ease of using emojis. It could be worth selecting a few emojis and GIFs that you want to use semi-regularly that fit your traits. Example: happy emojis for friendliness, flowers and trees could match sustainable, and things like the hands emojis and side eyes could push a more casual feel. This of course all depends on what you think of each emoji.

Instagram is image and video focused and so copy needs to match the assets you’ve used. You can have much longer captions, but the main part of your text should be at the start before the “read more” cut off – and it should encourage your audience to want to read more. Your tone of voice needs to be attention grabbing, informative, succinct. All of which can also fit with your traits.

Facebook has changed a lot over the years but for the most part it’s a platform where your audience is focused on friends and family. This means you need to work harder at catching their attention but also keep a genuine and friendly tone to match the rest of their feed. Use Facebook as a place to encourage discussion as this increase engagement and can help with the algorithm whilst keeping your personality through TOV.

You’ve also got LinkedIn which needs a more professional tone as it caters to business contacts. You want to keep your personality whilst keeping your language fit for the workplace. Plus, Pinterest which actually serves as more of a search engine – however ensuring your copy is TOV ready and also any text on your images fits this is important! You can write long or short captions but keeping in mind your SEO words and matching them to your tone is helpful for both new and returning audiences.

Creating TOV Guidelines

Like I mentioned before, writing things down can really help you to understand your own tone of voice, but also help you stick to them. Whether you write in a notepad or a word document, you can write down some clear guidelines as to how you want to speak to your audience and on each platform as well as ‘Dos’ and ‘Don’ts’ for you to follow.

The guidelines can be as simple as my example above for traits, and then additional points for each of the platforms. For example, on Facebook you always want to be engaging so you use question call-to-actions on every post. Or on Twitter you want to be funny and casual, so you use GIFs for 40% of your posts. Simple guidelines which don’t have to be hard rules but can help guide you whenever you’re creating content.

You can also go into much more detail if that’s something you want to do. You can set the guidelines for:

• Formal or informal – how casual your communication is.
• First person – are you using first person and using personal speech or third person and  impersonal speech? Or in the middle with second person?
• Reader emphasis – are you writing to the reader and using ‘you’
• Punctuation – which punctuation will you use? Are you fan of exclamation points or the oxford comma?
• Slang, colloquialisms, and dialects – if you’re using them or not and which words you’re using.
• Swearing – choose if you are or not swearing when communicating.
• Humour – what sense of humour will you have? If any?
• Referencing latest news and/or pop culture – will you be up to date or create timeless pieces which don’t reference these?