12 ways to add personality to your social media content
We all have seen social media profiles that are hardly getting 5 likes per post (coming from in-house employees). Slightly tweaked Canva templates and stock images don’t work anymore. Because people have raised their standards of social media, the only way to get results with your social media marketing is to add personality to social media content.
Personality-driven social media content fundamentals
To start producing better content and (finally) see real results from your social media marketing efforts, start by answering these fundamental questions.
Why should someone follow your content?
You may be copying all of the latest trends running around the office and repeating trends or creating numerous long, value-packed carousels only to hear crickets from your social media audience.
Why? Because people can sense, see, and feel if the content is inauthentic, impersonal, and doesn't represent your product or service.
Answer yourself, what is special about your brand? What kind of problem do you solve that is worth showing off on social media platforms?
Why your target audience is on social media? What are they looking for?
On social media, people either want to be educated or entertained (usually, it’s the last).
Check what kind of content your audience is consuming right now. Research their likes and comments on LinkedIn and Twitter or ask them directly.
What are their expectations from a brand? Whom do they follow and why? By taking into consideration all the answers, you'll be more knowledgeable to craft your own strategy.
What kind of content should you create?
What are your time and money resources? Do you feel comfortable in front of the camera and ready to shoot videos? Is there a person in your company who would like to become the face of it?
What kind of compliments have you received before via your social media? Maybe people appreciated your company updates, simple language, or anything else you can use (and double down on) when creating content.
How to add personality to social media content in 12 ways
A lot of companies create boring content. They tend to create templated carousels or share their updates, but people rarely resonate with such content. It’s because this content lacks personality.
Here are 12 ideas on how you can add personality to your brand content.
Put people forward
It's not a secret: people want to buy from people. The more you show your company, your team, and your customers, the quicker you'll build trust with your audience.
1. Lead with personal brands
This strategy is built upon embracing the development of personal brands within your company. It could be your company’s founder or a team member who builds the credibility of your product and showcases expertise in the industry.
Rand Fishkin (founder of SparkToro) used his personal brand and created videos to explain the essence of the tool his company developed.
First, for 7 years, he explained concepts and created strategies to showcase his other tool - Moz, an SEO software.
Now, he invited an aspiring marketer, Amanda Natividad, to build awareness with her personal brand and video content marketing around his next SaaS company, SparkToro.
2. Show your customers
If customers like your product, show that to others. There isn’t anything better than a raving community around your product because these people become your marketing department.
Taplio, a tool for building a personal brand on LinkedIn, is very proud to show its customers. That's how you build trust: if people see that influencers are using your tool, they become more keen to try it.
3. Create trust with video
Video content is the best way to establish credibility, reliability, and authenticity. With video content, you can communicate your message more effectively, show your expertise in an engaging manner, and build a stronger connection with your audience.
Hank Green is the best example of making low-effort yet value-packed videos. For example, he generated $1M for charity with just one TikTok video.
Even though he manages 4 companies, he posts his video content 2x per day. He takes his phone and just talks - no editing, just added captions. People don't bother about the quality because the value of his content outweighs everything else.
Get behind the scenes
People love to see behind-the-scenes bloopers and other entertaining and “real” information that companies usually hide. It's a good way you can share insights, show updates on the progress, spill out some future plans, and make your customers feel like a part of your company.
4. Build in public
Building in public is a very popular type of content that companies use to show their development. You can openly share your process and present updates, challenges, and insights.
Tella, a screen recording platform, uses social media to share the newest updates of their tool. As they're a video recording platform, their co-founder, Grant Shaddick, uses their own tool for that.
5. Appreciate the feedback
Guide people through your story in an engaging way, and make them feel heard and like they are a part of your journey. In your content, use sentences like “many of you have asked and we're happy to announce,” “thank you for your feedback, we finally released a new update,” and so on.
Notion product management team created a video where they explain new updates and improvements. It's cool to see several people from their teams showing their news.
If you scroll Notion feed on X, you can see they are showing all the updates and news. They also mention that these features were requested by their community, which makes people feel heard and their opinions – valued.
6. Show your process
While building in public means sharing what you're doing, showing your process means explaining the steps or methods you used to achieve a particular result or outcome.
Beehiiv, a newsletter platform, builds its social media content combined with its founders' personal brands while being transparent about what is currently happening in the company.
Add secret sauce
From a strategic point of view, this is the most difficult step in creating engaging content. Each brand should define for itself how its brand content would look like if it were a person.
How would they communicate? What are their content preferences? The more specific you can be in describing your brand as a human, the better it will be for developing your tone of voice and adding the secret sauce to your brand - the thing that differentiates you from your competitors and that is only about you and your brand.
7. Be bold in your communication
Brands that have a clear tone of voice and are confident, assertive, and direct in their messaging are the ones that get attention the most from their potential customers.
Sellfy, a storefront for digital files, used the moment to join the discussion of their competitor, Gumroad, news about pricing increase. As you can see, people loved Sellfy’s bold answer.
8. Lead with your values
Each company has its values and vision for the future. Define what your values are and include them in your communication. That's how you show what you care about and stand for.
Bubble, a no-code tool for building applications, emphasizes that they want to help others and empower them to build things with their tool. They're organizing webinars and conferences to inspire people to learn Bubble. They have created an accelerator program Immerse for underrepresented no-code founders: “women and femme-identifying folks”. As you can see Bubble shows their values - inclusion and equality.
9. Provoke emotional response
The best memories are associated with certain emotions. Through content, we can evoke happiness, anger, sadness, or fear. It could be done through specific words, images, or videos.
Michelle Marcelline is a co-founder of Typedream, a website-building tool. She shared the backstory of leaving Indonesia to move to the US and fulfill her dream of building a business like Mark Zuckerberg.
The response she got both on X and LinkedIn is phenomenal.
Please pay attention that the same post was tailored for a specific platform, it wasn't a copy-paste text.
Build a community
Create and nurture a sense of belonging and connection to your brand. It means engaging with your audience, celebrating their success, solving their problems, and showing you value their feedback and suggestions.
10. Engage with your audience
One of the easiest ways to activate your audience is to engage with them as a human would do. This can be done by responding to their comments, engaging with their content, and sending personalized DMs.
Castmagic, a tool to turn your podcast into content, demonstrates how it facilitates conversation with its audience. It makes a good impression.
11. Celebrate their success
Acknowledge and share your customers' achievements or accomplishments, celebrate their success together with them. And they'll do the same about your business success.
Lauren Bachman from Stan Store, an advanced link-in-bio tool, creates case studies about other creators making money online with their digital products or courses using Stan as a hosting platform.
12. Solve their problems
Listen to your customers and their difficulties. You'll earn their trust and appreciation if you can help them and solve the issues they're facing.
When Gumroad was increasing its prices, Lemon Squeezy used the moment and was active in solving people's problems with high fees. They offered 3% fees instead of 10%. It doesn't matter that later they had to increase their prices. For that moment, they were the heroes who listened to their potential customers.
Conclusion
If you want to stand out from the crowd with your social media marketing and become a thought leader in your industry, you need to create content that resonates with your audience. To get to represent your business authentically and as personal as possible.
You can use your personal brand as a founder of the company, show your team and colleagues, share the success of your customers and their testimonials, communicate with your audience, and engage with their content. All these activities on social media will create a sense of belonging and community.
If you’re a SaaS or B2B founder and want (finally) to see results from your social media, book a free strategy call with us.