Let me make this clear first. I’m not a social media marketer. I’m a healthcare professional with the passion for healthcare social media. As a healthcare professional, I want to improve healthcare in the Philippines. This is where social media fit in for me. I use social media to empower healthcare stakeholders. I’m making healthcare, social in the Philippines.
Some of the concepts I’m using in this talk are straight out from social media marketers guidebook. I know these concepts sound strange to people in the healthcare industry. Indulge me to borrow some terms from the marketers guidebook, if only to elucidate and achieve my goal for this talk- align social media strategy to advocacy goals and measure social media success. I promise to only give you the most basic and practical concept to guide you on formulating your advocacy’s social media strategy.
Here are the steps:
- Identifying social media goals and aligning this with your advocacy goals.
- Deciding your niches or target population.
- Determining what metrics to use to measure your social media success.
- Deciding on what social media tools to use in achieving your goals.
- Determining tools to monitor social media success.
Social Media Goals
Social media goals can be categorize into three broad categories. Brand awareness, lead generation and customer retention are social media goals that can be can be aligned with any advocacy goals. Brand awareness is aimed at generating more exposure for your brand/advocacy. The aim is more people recognizing your advocacy. Lead generation is about finding more advocates and opportunities for your advocacy. Its about getting converts to your advocacy. Customer retention is about keeping your present clients/advocates coming back for more. You can use social media to accomplish all these goals but it is difficult to do all three unless you have a large advocacy campaign budget. My recommendation is to pick one goal to focus in the meantime. Usually achieving one goal leads to another. Pick one that you know could demonstrate early success for your group and show this to your advocacy leaders. “Success”will encourage leaders to pour logistics to your social media campaigns.
So how do you choose which one social media goal fits your advocacy? Let’s do the following activities:
In the first activity, plot your existing social media strategy inside any of the three circles of social media goals where you think it belongs. If you don’t have one yet, don’t worry. The next activity will help you build one . Note that any strategy may be placed in between circles if they fall for both or all of the three categories.
The endpoint is to select one goal as your primary goal for social media. Also note that it is important to start with a goal that could potentially demonstrate early success.
The next activity is to do a SWOT analysis of each of your advocacy’s goals. Remember advocacy goals might be different from your advocacy goals
Look at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to all of these three goals. Prioritise your goals based on potential for short or long term success. Then, examine which of these goals would social media make an impact or demonstrate early success. This is basically how to align social media strategy with your advocacy goals
In the next activity we will further break down these social media goals/strategy in a funnel to add value to our advocacy.
