Share the Love: Leveraging Social Media Wins
Just about everyone in healthcare marketing would love to have a slice of social media effort or content to “go viral.” But, as you probably know, the chances of your post, video link, Facebook or Twitter post hitting the digital super-big-time are slim.
The “viral bonanza” seems desirable. But in social media for health care, the quality of viewers (the target audience you want) is usually more impactful than having a large number of (anyone-anywhere) viewers. And above all, you want “share-ability.” It’s far more practical and appropriate—and often overlooked in winning with social media—to leverage your sharable content. Here’s a quick illustration:
Our recent article, How to Turn Anxiety Into Fun, Excitement and Social Enthusiasm, put the “how-to” spotlight on the engaging and clever USC YES! Program of the University of South Carolina (USC). Our post pointed to a half-dozen marketing elements that used the college admission excitement of hundreds of students and channeled the energy to the Internet and social media.
In addition to appearing on our blog post, we referenced the article in our eNewsletter and various Healthcare Success social media platforms. It turns out that the Director of Undergraduate Admissions at USC, Mary Wagner (among others) did some re-tweets, giving readership for the article a nice bump in the stats.
Nope, there’s no claim here of going viral. But our greater success (and our point here) is that sharing—leveraging, promoting and cross promoting—is what wins the extra bases in social media. Sharable content is the difference between publishing an unremarkable factoid, and creating potentially contagious content that is interesting and compelling.
For any given bit of content...
- Is there a good reason for the reader to want to pass it along to others?
- Does your content reference another person, place or business that might extend the audience reach by sharing via reprint, re-tweet, Facebook Like, or other mutually beneficial extension?
The real leverage for effective healthcare marketing and social media is in connectivity and sharing. And the gateway to that is, “does this content sufficiently affect readers (emotionally touch them) in a way that they want to do even more (motivates action) and pass it on to others?
For more on this, be sure to read: 7 Secrets to Share-ability Versus Invisibility, and Rules of Engagement: Motivations That Make Your Content Contagious. And be sure to pass this along to others.
