Tone of voice

The tone of voice we take on social media is crucial to developing a relationship with our followers. It’s important to portray a personality that reinforces our brand, and embodies who we are as a service.

On Twitter for example, the personality of the @LeedsMuseums account is warm, welcoming and a little bit irreverent – but always honest and authentic. We own up to little mistakes we make, like accidentally tweeting the wrong date of an object, and post photos of our morning cups of tea. Over time, followers have related to this, and know what to expect from us as a brand, so they engage with us by responding with their own cups of tea, or retweeting us to their followers.

On social media we can be more informal than we are in a physical gallery space, and we need to be, to keep us on par with the other accounts in our followers news feeds. It’s a bit like making sure we’re speaking the right ‘internet language’. 

The tone of voice of each of our site accounts will vary, because of our different brands and audiences. But across all of them we want to make it clear that there is a real person posting behind each account. 

The first place to start is to ask yourself, with every post you write: why should someone care about this? Think about your audience as not already knowing anything about what you’re going to tell them. How do you talk to your friends about the work that you do?

It can be hard to develop a tone of voice when lots of people are inputting into content, and that’s where scheduling platforms can help as posts can be moderated for consistency.