Brand voice for LinkedIn: a guide that fits on one screen

A useful brand voice guide for LinkedIn fits on one screen. Write three short principles, one for voice, one for visual and one for format, each two or three sentences long and each made of rules a writer can check a draft against. Then update them every time you catch yourself making the same edit twice.

Most voice guides fail the other way. They run to twenty pages, describe the brand's personality in adjectives, and sit in a shared drive where nobody opens them after the first week.

Why most brand voice guides go unused

• They describe instead of instruct. 'Friendly, confident, human' tells a writer how the brand wants to feel, not what to do with the next sentence.
• They are too long. A writer with a draft open will not read twenty pages to check one line.
• They never change. The guide was written once at a workshop, and the edits you make every week never make it back into it.
• They try to cover every channel. A LinkedIn post, a support email and a billboard need different rules.

The three principles: voice, visual, format

Three is enough. More than that and rules start to argue with each other, and the writing turns grey trying to satisfy all of them.

• Voice: how the posts sound. Register, sentence length, what evidence they cite, what they will never claim.
• Visual: what an image for a post looks like. Subject matter, treatment, and what to avoid.
• Format: how a post is built. Typical length, how it opens, whether it uses line breaks or lists, how it ends.

Good rules and useless rules

A good rule is one you could hand to a stranger with a draft and they could tell whether the draft follows it. A useless rule is one every draft technically passes.

• Useless: 'Be authentic.' Useful: 'Numbers before adjectives. If a sentence says growth was strong, replace it with the growth.'
• Useless: 'Sound confident.' Useful: 'No hedging words such as might, perhaps or arguably when the evidence is in the post.'
• Useless: 'Keep it engaging.' Useful: 'Open with the most specific fact in the post. Never open with a question.'
• Useless: 'Professional yet approachable.' Useful: 'Short sentences. One idea per paragraph. No industry jargon a customer would not use.'
• Useless: 'Eye-catching visuals.' Useful: 'Photographs of real work spaces, muted colour, no stock people shaking hands, no text in the image.'
• Useless: 'Concise.' Useful: 'Under 1,300 characters. End on the finding, not a call to action.'

How to write your first version

1. Collect ten posts you admire, from anyone, and ten of your own you are unhappy with.
2. For each one, write down in a line what makes it work or fail. Be concrete: 'buries the number', 'three adjectives in the first line'.
3. Group the lines into voice, visual and format.
4. Turn each group into two or three sentences written as instructions. 'Say where the number came from' instead of 'we value transparency'.
5. Read your last five posts against the guide. If none of them would change, the rules are too vague.

An example that fits on one screen

Here is what a finished guide might look like for a small bookkeeping firm that posts on LinkedIn:

• Voice: Plain, short declarative sentences with no hedging. Every claim names where it came from, usually client work described without names. Never promises savings or outcomes a reader could not check.
• Visual: Photographs of desks, paperwork and small offices, natural light, muted colour. No stock people, no charts with invented numbers, no text in the image.
• Format: 800 to 1,300 characters. First line is the most specific fact in the post. Short paragraphs, a list only when there are three or more parallel items, and the post ends on the finding.

Update it from the edits you keep making

The best source of new rules is your own red pen. Every time you edit a draft, you are telling the guide something it did not know. Most people make the same edit dozens of times and never write it down.

1. When you change a draft, note the change in one line.
2. The second time you make the same kind of change, it is a pattern.
3. Rewrite the matching principle so the rule is built in. Replace the old sentence rather than adding a new one at the bottom, so the principle stays short.
4. Separate facts from rules. 'The figure is 40 not 60' is a correction to one post. 'Always say whether a figure is monthly or annual' is a rule.
5. Reread the whole guide once a quarter and delete anything no draft has broken in months.

What does not belong in a voice guide

• Your mission statement. It describes the company, not the writing.
• Topics. What you post about belongs in your themes, a separate short list.
• Rules for other channels. Keep a LinkedIn guide about LinkedIn.
• Tricks for reach. A rule like 'always ask a question at the end' is a tactic, and it ages faster than a voice.

How GoodSocials handles this

Every GoodSocials profile has exactly three brand principles, voice, visual and format, written from your website at setup as instructions to a writer, two or three sentences each. They are plain text on the board, and you can edit them whenever you like.

The part that saves the most time is the revise comment. When you write a comment on a card, it rewrites that card and decides which one principle the comment was about. If the comment is a standing preference, such as 'no questions as openers', the matching principle is rewritten in full with the rule folded in, not appended as a note, and the board tells you in one sentence what every future post will now do. If the comment corrects a fact about that one card, such as a wrong number or a client who should not be named, the card is fixed and no principle changes, so a one-off correction never turns into a rule.

Two things stay fixed whatever a principle or a comment says. Posts are written in the third person, naming the company and the source, because software wrote them. And a request for engagement bait or a claim bigger than the evidence gets the smallest honest version on the card and is never written into a principle.