How to balance professionalism and personality with your social media posts
Your social media channels are often the first place a potential client forms an opinion about you. When your posts read like a corporate brochure, you lose your audience. When they read like a personal diary, you lose your audience, too.
Professionalism and personality must work together. You simply need to get the balance right.
Understand what professionalism and personality actually mean online
Professionalism on social media doesn’t mean stiff, formal language or industry jargon. Your posts should be consistent, be credible and reflect the standards you apply to your work. Beyond that, your personality has room to come through.
Sharing that you closed a deal after a long negotiation or that you are proud of a team member shows your personality. Venting frustrations about a client or wading into political debates is oversharing and unprofessional.
A mortgage broker who mentions that they felt great satisfaction helping a first home buyer navigate a complicated approval process is being personal without being inappropriate. Celebrating a client win shows care, competence and humanity all at once.
Lead with value, then let your personality carry it
Effective social media content creation starts with a clear, useful idea. Once the value is there, you can inject some personality to show the information is coming from a real person rather than a content machine.
A commercial finance broker could post a practical explanation of how cash-flow funding works for seasonal businesses, framed in the broker’s own voice, with a real-world scenario they recently encountered. The information builds trust. Your voice builds connection.
Use behind-the-scenes content to show the person behind the business
People engage with people. Behind-the-scenes posts, like a glimpse into how you work or a challenge you solved this week, humanise your business without compromising your credibility. When your audience understands who you are and how you work, trust follows far more naturally.
A builder who shares the process of resolving an unexpected structural issue on a site, without throwing anyone under the bus, demonstrates problem-solving ability and transparency. A glimpse-behind-the-curtains post outperforms a polished corporate post because it shows what working with that company actually looks like.
Invest in your copywriting
How you write is what determines where professionalism ends and your personality begins. The same information can be read as cold and corporate or warm and human depending on word choice, sentence rhythm and tone. Developing your writing skills gives you control over how you come across, rather than hoping your meaning lands the way you intended.
If you know what you want to say but struggle to write it in a way that captures who you actually are, Hunter & Scribe can help. Our team specialises in digital marketing copy for the property and financial sectors, working with real estate agents, financial advisers, accountants, conveyancers and more.
Contact Hunter & Scribe to find out how we can take writing off your plate.
