Tone

In the context of social media, tone refers to the particular attitude, feeling, or personality expressed through written or visual communication across platforms. This is often dictated by the brand or individual and is a part of their established identity. Tone is what dictates the high-level connection between an entity and its audience.

It's a part of the entity's emotional appeal. It's how an entity expresses itself when it isn't trying to directly persuade its audience to take a specific action. It's almost like the entity is talking with its audience rather than at its audience.

To achieve this effect, brands and individuals alike use words with particular meanings, in particular ways, and with particular types of punctuation. They knit together a number of different elements (and emojis, of course) into a type of composite character that holds true across different tweets, posts, replies, and other types of social events that make up their lives as social entities.