Happy World AIDS Day!
By the way, today is a good day to spend time on social media and see what the health brands you admire are sharing.
This edition is a spontaneous one. Yesterday, I had the privilege of performing a voluntary social media audit for a health brand. I figured it is best I share the basics, not just based on my findings from this singular activity, but alongside my past experiences with reviewing social accounts and 56+ weeks of full-time remote work, creating content, and managing social media within the health space.
I find that this is relevant and timely because as we wrap up the year, a lot of companies will be looking to do seasonal sales and promotional activities, while some will be revamping or rebuilding their content/social media strategy from ground up.
Healthcare brands that are digitally unaware, may be losing out so much by 2022, as more people get on social media platforms. Nigeria, for instance, 101.7 million people (that is 48% of the population) are mobile phone users who access the internet via mobile phones (browsers and apps). By 2022, the numbers, as reported, are expected to rise to 52%. Consequently, by 2025, the number of smartphone users in Nigeria will be no less than 140 million people.
The question remains: what is in it for the healthcare brands, corporate or personal, who are yet to properly position themselves on commonly used online platforms or communities, to drive needed solutions? For me, on a personal note, what I find surprising with these numbers, is the level of health and news misinformation that goes aspreading even as the number of smartphone or internet users increase.
This means every healthcare worker, subject matter expert, influencer, provider, or company, has a role to play by meeting the needs of people where they are, with little or no delays. Social media provides us with that opportunity. By this I mean leveraging social media, not building the company on social media, so that one must not go beyond ethical boundaries, as the internet is such an open space accessible to everyone, either from a front-end or a back-end.
That being said, here are five of the many inexhaustive tips I feel itās important for you to know.
Start from the very beginning: social media content strategy or plan
Where do you want to go? What do you want to achieve? How? Where? When? And Why? A content strategy is like your map that shows you your destination, what routes exist to get there and how to get there using available means of transportation. A social media content strategy is useless if it does not tie back to the business goals and objectives. If you do not do this mental work, you will find yourself using a fire brigade approach to share messages on social media. You may also find yourself sharing more monotonal, repetitive, non-diverse content that does not specifically tell your companyās story or speak to the ideal people it should address. In fact, you make even begin to sound like everyone else on social media, thus becoming a social nuisance.
The content calendar is the strategy broken down into action
Imagine sharing content on World AIDS Day a week after? The world has moved on temporarily to other matters of public health concern, the hashtags are no longer trending, the people youāre targeting are now probably being targeted by another group on a more timely issue and no one has the fragmented attention to share or spare. Well, this is one of the many things that happen in the absence of a functional content calendar. Alongside the strategy, you need something firm, yet flexible to run with. A content calendar becomes a quick go-to place that allows you to see, know and create narratives that are relevant and timely.
Choose a primary social media platform
When I do audits or get asked āWhat do you think about our social media presence?ā during interviews, one of the things I am not quick to respond with is āWhy are you spreading yourself so thin?ā I just go to the point, tell you what I observed for each platform and then, I may ask, āWhat is your primary social media platform?ā This is where it becomes hard, or people hesitate to answer. I have seen social media managers burn out because they are afraid to help an organization define its primary and secondary social platforms. The brand is everywhere, with divided focus, yet yielding no results. A primary platform is the most important platform where the brand reaches the key people or prioritized audience for their business or cause. For example, before the ban by the Federal Government of Nigeria, Twitter was the primary social account of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control, while Linkedin and Facebook were the secondary platforms. You will find this in similar organizations because it enables them to keep everyone āthe media, the people, politicians, patients, funders, collaborating partners, government agencies, and parastatalsā updated, within the shortest possible time on recent happenings. When you spread yourself so thin, you may find nothing to hold on to and you may tend to prioritize quantity over quality. In fact, the team may appear at weekly or monthly review meetings much more confused that they even begin to question why they went social in the first place.
What is the tone of the messaging?
If you have to create patient-centered health materials or content, they must be patient-friendly. I have spent quite some time in previous editions writing on why you need to eliminate jargon. You want to write narratives that empower a person living with obesity to come onboard your nutrition/exercise/lifestyle plan, not make them feel so bad that they give up on this journey. You want to let people living with obesity know why HbA1c is an ideal test for long-term sugar monitoring, and not just command them to do it with a āDo-a-HbA1c-test-todayā social media post. Gone are the days when the practitioner was the āgod of the medical practiceā. Patient idiosyncracies exist and they are as unique as their fingerprints.
One thing to keep in mind is that the tone for the health messaging is not set in stone. You have to consider factors like your goals, the nature of the audience āage, sociocultural factors, literacy levels, and the likesābefore deciding how you want your message to be assimilated. When writing for children, keep it really simple, visual, and friendly. Think of how they feel when they see cartoons or read childrenās books. You want their eyes to light up with keen interest when they read the material that you share.
Monitor your progress
Getting it right with social media is not a dayās job. Since it is a platform not primarily owned by you, the algorithms keep changing over time. For instance, Linkedin prioritizes videos and images, over text-only content, Twitter groups posts on similar topics and keywords, shared or liked by someone you follow, so that they appear together on your timeline, then using the wrong image sizes for an Instagram carousel is the easiest way to reduce engagement rates.
Yet, based on what you have already designed as your goal for using social media, you want to track the metrics that speak closely to those goals in your strategy. For instance, if your goal is to create awareness, that is, to make sure that people know there is a brand like X offering dental services, an impact metric like reach count is the basic way to assess this. If you want to know how well your post on World AIDS Day performed on Twitter, metrics like engagement (view count on videos, media views, likes, retweets, replies, and quoted replies) and engagement ratio (number of people who saw the post on their timeline versus those who clicked, liked, retweetedā¦) can help you know what to do or not do, going forward.
The list is inexhaustive, even for similar brands doing the same thing within the industry, what worked for A might not work for B. But the most important takeaway is to go social to expand your reach. People are looking for answers to health and health-related challenges online. Do not hide your expertise or shrink in these day of opportunity.
Got questions or comments? Please reply to this post or via email, healthliteracynotepad@gmail.com
Note: I do not own the rights to the image used in this edition and will edit to include credits as soon as I find the source. Also, all Graphic Interchange Formats are from an open-source platform.
A quote I am ruminating on
āA brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is ā it is what consumers tell each other it isā ā Simon Cook
Resources for Further Reading:
Hootsuiteās pillar post on How to create a social media strategy.
Opportunities of the week:
Apply for a fully-funded online Masterās program in Sexual & Reproductive Health Policy and Programming at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
Apply to the Kofi Annan Global Health Leadership Programme
Register to attend the First International Conference on Public Health in Africa
Some Important health events in December
Safe Toys and Gifts Month
Dec 05-11: National Handwashing Awareness Week
Dec 06-12: National Influenza Vaccination Week
Dec 06-10: National Older Driver Safety Awareness Week
Dec 01: World AIDS Day
Dec 02: National Pollution Prevention Day
Dec 04: International Day of People with Disability
Dec 10: Human Rights Day
Dec 12: International Universal Health Coverage Day
Dec 27: International Day of Epidemic Preparedness
Download the calendar of 2021 health events here.
Catch you again next week.
Keep pushing,
Chidindu Mmadu-Okoli
Health Literacy Notepad
I love this particular note. Especially the patient doctor interaction graphic snippet. Social media for health brands needs to be responsive and compassionate; not merely academic.
Good work Chidindu.