Finding Time to Communicating via Social Media

It's a great idea to block time in your calendar to write content for your social media posts.

This might be weekly, monthly or even quarterly.

Treat this time as you would a client appointment.

Perhaps January is a quiet time for your business. This is the perfect opportunity to create several social media posts that you can use throughout the following months.

Remember that creating posts will take you longer while you learn the tools and techniques. Soon, you will be much quicker and be able to create several in the time it took you to create one!

Have a notebook or note in your phone in which you can jot down ideas of things you might like to post about. This way you have inspiration, resources and a starting point when you sit down during your blocked writing time.

Look at posts by other people posting on similar topics. Get ideas of what you like and don't like, and also what seems to get better engagement.

It's fine to be inspired by how others are posting!

Also tap into awareness campaigns for different topics e.g. World Heart Day or International Women's Day. Consider how you might be able to personalise these messages to your audience.

People generally want short, sharp, easy to understand messages, whether written or in a video.

This is what most social media platforms are design for.

• Keep sentences short. About 17 words is a good guide.

• Leave plenty of white space. Slabs of text are not so appealing to read.
  Gaps are good on a screen and make the text more readable.

• Pitch your communication at the audience's knowledge level.

• Avoid using science terms and acronyms that your audience might not understand.

• Avoid going off on a tangent or conflating issues. It's easy to do as nothing stands alone in health, so focus on keeping your message clean and clear.

• Use bullet points.

• Save longer texts or articles for a blog on your website or to publish elsewhere.

• Point people to visit articles you have written with short engaging posts on social media. There's no need to rewrite all the points in a post.

• Keeping things short saves you time and also shows that you value the time of your audience.

• Make information easy to access. Burying information more than one click away will reduce the likelihood that it gets seen.

Collaboration may also be useful if you are struggling to find time for social media. If you are part of a network of health professionals in a local area consider getting together with these health professionals to start a social media presence as a collaboration.

A collaboration will benefit from shared expertise, shared resources and the ability to brainstorm content and marketing ideas together. If you use social media as a tool to build referrals working with a network can also allow you to refer clients to each other based on the specialist expertise.

There are a number of tools available that help you schedule posts in one go - meaning you can set up your posts for the week (or the month) during your planned social media time. Some of the tools also have built in analytics so that you can track your engagement as well. Many of the tools are subscription based but many of them offer a free trial - try one out that is within your budget and see if it is the right tool for you.

Such tools include:

• Hootsuite

• Tweetdeck

• Loomly

• Sprout Social

• Canva Pro

There are tools available that can help you assess your campaign reach and engagement.

This is especially handy if you are posting on a couple of different platforms.

• The most basic insights tool you can use is observing the post engagement e.g. how many likes or comments on a post.

Deeper insights can be gained by accessing analytics.

• The Ultimate Guide to Social Media Analytics - https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/social-media-analytics

• Monitor your website traffic - https://goatcloud.com/2013/10/17/very-basics-on-how-to-monitor-website-traffic/

• Some platforms have their own analytics you can access

  • Twitter analytics

  • Instagram insights

  • Google Analytics

There's no need to spend hours taking photos for your social media posts. There are so many amazing photos available on the internet that you can either pay for or use for free.

* NOTE - you cannot use just any image you find on the web, including ones you find in Google images. These might be subject to copyright.

Use free or paid stock photography or graphic websites to gather images.

Create your own image library to use for your future posts.

Free Resources

• Pexels - https://www.pexels.com/

• Unsplash - https://unsplash.com/images/stock

• Pixabay - https://pixabay.com/

• Free images - https://www.freeimages.com/

Paid Resources

• Shutterstock - https://www.shutterstock.com/

• iStock - https://www.istockphoto.com/

• Stockphoto - https://www.stockphoto.com/

Use user-friendly online design tools to create visually appealing content.

• Canva is an easy-to-learn useful tool that has both a free and subscription offering

Canva also offers great mini courses as videos in their Design School, such as Master Social Media and many other great resources in the Learn section.

There is a lot of ready-made health-related social marketing content out there that you can use.

In fact, the organisations that have run the campaigns would love you to share their material and spread the message.

We've already included a list of some great campaigns in the Links & Resources section of the Social Marketing page.

Using some of these is often as simple as sharing an image or video.

Here is an example survey that you could adapt the help you segment your audience. We used this in the Communicating Health project in relation to the LEHS outlined on the segmenting case study page.

There is always the option to pay someone else to do the work for you. There are individuals and businesses that can help you with:

• Graphic design

• Content writing

• Scheduled posting

• Content promotion

• Assessing your campaign reach and engagement

Ask other business owners for recommendations or do a web search to find a service that suits your needs.