Healthcare social media tips

From The CDC’s Guide to Writing for Social Media

You have decided that you need to reach the masses about your health care service lines. Your strategy: use social media to build an audience that will be highly engaged with all of the content you deliver. Over time this will raise awareness about your brand and drive patient loyalty and satisfaction which will lead to increased referrals. Your content will differentiate you amongst the competition and all of the other noise and clutter out there on the airwaves.

You sit down to write your Facebook post and twitter line…. Okay great, that was easy. Wow, look at all of the clicks we’re getting! Now the second post; getting better… not sure. The third; hmmm, that didn’t seem to interest a lot of folks. The fourth post; no clicks. The fifth; fresh out of ideas already. Now what? This is harder than we thought….

If you need a little direction or inspiration, the CDC has published a guide for writing social media based on their past three years of experience with the new media platforms that we all know and love (i.e. Facebook and Twitter). The guide is chock full of examples on how to write Facebook and Twitter lines that get the job done right. Let’s look at some of the CDC’s best practices for writing social media posts.

Here are a couple of chapters that I found most helpful. Download the complete guide here.

• Chapter 3: Don’t believe the hype. Just because FB and Twitter have been glamorized by every marketing guru, doesn’t mean these platforms will work by themselves. Creating relevant content is what will make the campaign stick and report back numbers that show engagement and effectiveness with your audience.
• Chapter 7: Repurpose web content. Here is how you “kill two birds with one stone” in the content marketing world. You know all of that great content that is sitting on your website that people need to search really hard for to find on Google? Reuse that content over FB and Twitter to gain extra traction with your message. Research reports, FAQs, and events are all newsworthy items that your audience wants to learn and hear about.
• Chapter 9: There is a great checklist that you can hang on your office wall to glance at before you send out your new and improved posts and tweets.