Letting your personality shine through in your business can be a bit daunting. After all, it’s more than likely that there will be people who don’t find it appealing. But chances are that they are not YOUR people. On the other hand, if you show personality in business can help you to attract your people and build your tribe.
Here are 5 ways to show your personality without oversharing or seeming unprofessional:
1. Business celebrations
Share your business celebrations. Have a cake, a morning tea, a lunch or even a dinner for business anniversaries. For smaller anniversaries, it can be something as simple as sharing a picture of your cake or morning tea spread on social media, your website and in your newsletter. For more significant anniversaries, you might want to invite key clients to a lunch or dinner to celebrate.
If you’re office is moving, don’t just notify your clients, take pictures and videos to share on social media. If you can catch an amusing disaster, all the better! Letting your clients see the move in process can make them feel more involved.
2. Team members
Put your team members front and centre. Include them on your website, showcase them in your newsletter and refer to them by name when talking to clients. For example, instead of “I’ll put you through to accounts” say “I’ll put you through to Joe in accounts”.
Create bios to go on your website and in your newsletter. Get a good photo of everyone, consider getting a photographer in to take portraits of all staff for the sake of consistency. Then write up short bios that you can include on the website and showcase in your newsletter. They don’t have to be super personal, just something brief about each staff members previous experience, what they love about their job and maybe a generic hobby or two. “In her spare time, Jill is a motocross champion” or “As well as balancing accounts, Joe enjoys cooking and dancing”.
3. Fun
Sharing a joke or some interesting news in the local community is a great way to show personality in business. There’s no reason that everything you share must be about your business. So, have a bit of fun and give your clients a laugh or some light reading. Of course, it’s important to make sure your sense of humour hits the right notes. Your business is not the place to display your black humour – save that for personal sites.
Sharing local news is particularly good if your target clients are local. It will help you become a part of the wider community and getting involved with local events and causes is a great way to meet locals and become better known. If a geographically local community is not your community, then you could share items of interest to your clients.
4. Social good
Share information about the social good your business is involved in. It will not only help raise the profile of the charities, but it will also let your clients know what’s important to you. Try not to be too doom and gloomy in your promotions. But do share a link to the charities website, donation page or an article on a recent win they’ve had.
If you’re taking part in an event for your favourite charities, or if they’re holding an event, publicise it on your social media pages and in your newsletter. If clients or suppliers donate to the event, make sure to thank them on your social media accounts, in your newsletter, in a blog post and even in a press article. Charity events being held locally are a great way to get a little press exposure.
Also, keep in mind that it’s becoming more and more important for businesses to not only be good at what they do, but to also be good global citizens. Not only in terms of how they support charity, but how they behave ecologically. If you take steps to lower your carbon footprint, make sure you write an article about the changes.
5. Outside interests
I’ve mentioned this briefly in the Team Member section, but it’s good to occasionally share some information about outside interests. It’s best to stay away from politics, unless someone is running for office or you know that your clients have a similar political view. Otherwise, it’s good to share when someone has a win in a competition, or there is some sort of event that you’re competing in – particularly as an office team. Even things like who took out the office tipping pool can be shared as long as your social media accounts are getting hits from the shares.
Other things to share are cute pets, local scenery, something extraordinary in some way, some beautiful food (not your daily lunch, but a spectacular cake). Anything that’s a little out of the ordinary, but will let your clients get to know you a little better.
There are a lot of different ratios about how to share content. My favourite is 5-3-2 which says that of 10 published articles, 5 should be content from others, 3 should be your content and 2 should be personal items. However you decide to do it, remember that sharing personal items should be done sparingly. Don’t go overboard and post your entire life for your clients to see. It’s great to show personality in business but try not to overshare. But don’t have a totally dry and impersonal business persona. Unless that’s the image you want.
If you’d like some more ideas, check out some of my posts on branding to see where else you can bring a bit of personality to your business.
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