3 Ways to Develop Your Social Branding Guide
Your healthcare brand has many different ways to interact with your greater community, but none is more important that social media. It’s not the way you are starting to communicate with the world, it’s the way the world communicates. Your social media may fall under general marketing, but your healthcare organization needs an actual social branding strategy in place, it’s that crucial to your brand. We’ve outlined 3 ways to get your social branding guide started.
1. Put the standards in writing
Your healthcare brand should be recognizable across all platforms, from Facebook to Instagram and beyond. Created a brand standards guide and put the expectations in writing for all of your employees, even those who may not be on your social media team. If your employees mention your healthcare brand in a post, or use a hashtag associated with your organization, they need to be on message. When it comes to social media, anyone can be a brand advocate.
2. Content counts
Every social media platform has a few things in common, so you can post the same content across all channels, but you shouldn’t. The audiences you are trying to reach in healthcare are different to some degree, but there’s still a lot of crossover. You don’t want the people who follow you on Twitter to get bored with your Facebook content.
Think about what works best for each platform:
- Snapchat lends itself to a “behind the scenes” vibe, it can be raw and unedited.
- Instagram followers want a more polished look, beautiful pictures with filters.
- Facebook lets you share entire articles with video and more.
- twitter has a 140 charter limit and you have to take brevity into account.
So, if you are excited about a new piece of equipment coming into your healthcare facility, you could use Snapchat to show the initial arrival. Then post a stylized shot of the state-of-the-art tech on Instagram, head over to Facebook with video and an article on how it will help patients, then tweet about the staff’s excitement on Twitter.
It’s the same subject across all platforms, but each tweaked a bit as part of your social media branding plan.
3. Managing it all
After your put your standards down on paper, learn to treat each platform a bit differently, you’ll need to make sure your social branding strategy gets put into place on a daily basis.
- Choose a dedicated social team
- Define your target audience on each platform
- Get the correct tools (automated posting, calendar, etc.)
Social media is the perfect place to build your healthcare brand, you can start the conversation every day. A full social media branding strategy will take a fair of amount of effort and planning but a guide is the first essential step. One you get organized, it’s just a matter of sticking to the plan.
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