Welcome to this week’s social media tip. Today I want you to think about how you can do more than just add to the online chatter.
Here are four questions to ask yourself before you post to your social media channels.
1. Is this post valuable to my social media followers?
Ask yourself why your followers (and not just you, personally) would find the content to be valuable.
Better still, ask your audience.
Go right to your audience and ask them what kind of content they’d like to see from you. You can create quick polls on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram or go deeper with a survey. Survey Monkey, Polldaddy and Google’s own survey forms are all simple tools of the trade which have been around for ages and they still work really well.
Recommended Reading: 7 Places To Discover What Your Audience Wants To Read (So You Can Write It For Them!)
2. Which channel is best suited for this post?
Now that you are certain the information adds value, it’s time to decide which channel would be best suited to convey this message.
If you have already created a mission statement for each of your brand’s social media profiles, this step is easy: just see which channel’s mission statement best describes the post.
Recommended Reading: How To Create A Social Media Mission Statement For Your Healthcare Business
3. Is this post optimized for the social network I’ve selected?
While the quality of your content is a key factor for successful social sharing, how you present your information is also very important.
Study after study confirms that how you create and share content matters — with visual content leading the way. According to research by Kissmetrics, photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based posts.
Obviously, if you’re sharing on a visual channel, like Instagram, you’ll want to add high-quality visuals, but consider adding visuals also to more text-based channels like Twitter. Tweets with photos give a boost to engagement rates.
Pro Tip: You can easily create your own images with drag-and-drop tools, like Canva and Ribbet. They will also automatically create the right sizes for your Facebook page, so you don’t need to worry about it.
Recommended Reading: 10 Places To Find The Best Free Images For Your Healthcare Marketing
Other things to consider when it comes to optimizing your posts are using the correct hashtags and creating an impactful headline.
Recommended Reading: 50 Power Words To Super Charge Your Content Marketing
4. Am I posting this at the best time?
To optimize your engagement and reach, you want to share content when your audience is online. If you search for optimal posting times, you will find many guides online. You can follow these recommendations as a starting point, but it’s best to do your own testing to see which days and times work best for your own audience.
Once you’ve determined the right posting times for each social channel, schedule your posts to hit those times. Use a scheduling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite.
Recommended Reading: How To Better Manage Social Media With Hootsuite
Putting it all together
I’ve been sharing this graphic for the past three years from Hootsuite and I still love it. The questions above are based on this flowchart. Keep it close to you and refer to it often.
Here’s to your social media success!
Health Care Social Media 