Updated. Since first writing this post, Click To Tweet has launched a Google Chrome Extension that makes it even easier to use the tool on any website you visit. Now, you can create and share a Click To Tweet link just by clicking a button in your Chrome browser. A Click To Tweet window will appear pre-filled with information about the site you are on and make it easy to customize and create a new link.
Click to Tweet is a cool free tool which generates one-click tweet boxes or links that can be shared through your website, your blog, or via email. It’s a powerful way to increase social shares and highlight quotes, stats, and key takeaways for your content marketing.
Here’s a good example of how it looks on a blog.
And here’s how to do it for your own blog or website.
Step One: Sign in with your Twitter account.
Step Two: Write the message that you want others to share in the box provided.
Step Three: Click the “Generate New Link” button to create a custom link.
Step Four: Share the link and track the activity of each link over time.
Whoever clicks on the link will have the message automatically added to their Twitter status box- they simply click to tweet.
Social media has an increasingly important role to play in maintaining a healthcare organization’s reputation and image. Not only are patients seeking health information online, but many also say their choice of a specific doctor, hospital or medical treatment is influenced by social media.
Patients are also using social media to vocalize how they feel about their doctors, drugs, treatment plans, insurance, and medical devices. Don’t think if you are not on social media, patients aren’t discussing your organization. You can’t opt-out of reputation management – whether you have a social media presence or not, a patient who has a bad experience with your organization is only one tweet or Facebook post away from sharing it with the world.
Be Proactive in Managing Your Online Reputation
It is far better to take control of your reputation by responding to these conversations yourself and correcting any misinformation or misperceptions. Responding in real-time strengthens public perception that your focus is firmly on patient satisfaction.
Remember that everything you do online – every blog post, every tweet, every conversation – is a reflection of your brand. A successful social media presence hinges on the trust between you and your followers. Becoming a trusted source of health information for your patients and proactively developing a strong, consistent, and credible image online will increase patient trust and confidence in your organization.
Social Media Is An Essential Component of Healthcare Marketing
Realising social media’s potential in healthcare requires an organizational culture that values social media as central to its overall strategy. Social media should be viewed not as an add-on, but as an essential component of healthcare marketing. Unlike traditional marketing practices that have stayed constant for decades, social media is still a relatively new marketing channel with new networks, updates, and features constantly emerging. Marketing departments need to invest more of their budget in platforms and resources that takes full advantage of the opportunities presented by social media.
Create A Winning Strategy
The best social media accounts are precisely targeted, updated frequently, and foster an ongoing dialogue with followers. that’s why it’s so important to have a plan in place at the outset and monitor, measure, and adjust your progress as you go.
Start by optimizing your website – think of it as your home-base to which you will be directing your social media followers to find relevant and engaging information. With more people accessing the Internet via mobile devices, make sure your site is optimized for mobile viewing. to increase the likelihood that your website will be placed at the top of google search results, thereby earning you trust with your audience, consider adding a blog to your site. A blog serves to proactively show your patients that you are a trusted source of healthcare information.
Next, put a content promotion plan in place. In today’s noisy social media world, you need to amplify your content to be heard. Make it easy for people to share your site’s content on social media by incorporating social share icons prominently throughout your website.
Create lots of visual content such as infographics and videos and encourage people to share these on social media. Post updates about your hospital’s accomplishments, showcasing ground-breaking surgeries, cutting-edge research, and the work of high- profile staff members. Cross-promote each piece of content you create but do not copy and paste the same post on each platform—format each of them to meet the requirements of the specific platforms.
At the end of each week, take time to monitor and measure the impact of your social media activity. Monitor your engagement rates and pages views to see which channels get the most attention and measure the return on investment for paid ads and social media promotions.
Wrapping Up
Social media’s influence has still not reached its peak; it will continue to disrupt healthcare in ways we are only beginning to understand. It is equally important nowadays for healthcare organizations to communicate with patients online as it is through more traditional offline channels. Knowing how to leverage this opportunity is an essential skill for the modern healthcare organization. I like to use a quote from Erik Qualman: “We do not have a choice on whether we do social media, the question is – how well we do it”.
Pinning a Tweet allows you to showcase your best content at the top of your profile page for as long as you’d like.
In the past Twitter typically only allowed viewers to see posts in a sequential timeline which meant that your most important or relevant content quickly got lost in the fast-moving Twitter stream.
To solve this issue Twitter now allows you to pin a tweet or keep it placed at the top of the newsfeed giving you more editorial control as to what a viewer will see first when visiting your page.
How To Pin A Tweet
It’s super quick and easy to do. Follow the steps below to pin your first tweet.
1. Open up your Twitter Profile Page.
2. Choose a Tweet you would like to Pin. Select “Pin to your profile page”.
3. The Tweet will now automatically appear at the top of Page.
4. To remove a pinned tweet, simply click on the “unpin” option.
It’s a good idea to review your pinned tweets regularly to make sure you are sharing up-to-date posts. Out-dated pins will make your profile look out-dated too. To refresh your Twitter profile simply choose another tweet to pin. Twitter will ask you to confirm if you want to replace your current pinned tweet.
It couldn’t be easier to follow these steps and it’s something you should certainly do to highlight your accomplishments, share your latest news, and bring your viewers attention to the posts you want them to see first.
Welcome to this week’s social media quick tip. This week I want to show you how to find old tweets in your Twitter archive.
Have you ever wanted to search your Twitter archive to locate an old tweet?
Twitter shows your most recent 3,200 tweets in your timeline, which sounds like a lot, but if you’ve been using Twitter for quite a while and tweet a lot, you may find it hard to search for old tweets.
The solution lies in Twitter’s Advanced Search function. Here’s how to perform a search for your old tweets.
Welcome to this week’s social media quick tip. This week I want to show you how to embed a Tweet on your website or blog.
1. Select a Tweet to embed on your site. Click on the down arrow icon (v).
2. Select Embed Tweet from the drop-down list.
3. Now simply and paste the code provided into your blog or website.
An embedded Tweet includes the Tweet itself, any media contents (photos, video) so if you don’t wish to include these, go to Customization Options and check “Hide Conversation.”
Here you also have the option of translating your embedded Tweet into another language and selecting the colour you would like it to appear as on your website or blog.
Here’s some interesting data from Dan Zarrella of Hubspot on optimizing your tweets in order to increase your click-through rate of the links you post on Twitter.
Placing your links about a quarter way through your tweet, using more verbs and adverbs, tweeting late in the day and at weekends appears to increase the likelihood of click-through.
Twitter reminded me last week that I’ve been on the platform for 13 years!
Even though I’ve seen Twitter change over the last decade, becoming less friendly and more confrontational, it’s still the social network I visit several times a day.
Over the years I’ve met so many incredible people on Twitter – some of whom have become friends in real life.
I’ve been invited to speak at conferences around the globe.
I’ve never been so strategically connected.
And all because of Twitter.
And yet I still meet people who tell me they just don’t get Twitter. They say it’s just a place to post what you ate for breakfast, or lunch, or.. well you get the picture.
But here’s the thing about Twitter that not everyone realizes, you build your own experience to suit your interests and needs.
Twitter is the frame, not the picture, what’s inside is largely up to you.
I love discovering new tools and apps which help make our social media marketing activities more manageable and more productive. Each Monday I share one of favourite social media management tools with you to try during the coming week. Today I want to put some of those tools together in this post organized around the theme of blogging. These tools will help you create, edit and promote your blog content more effectively.
Bit.ly is a tool which creates shortened links to track the performance of your content once you promote it. Use it to create a custom short link for each post you create and share.
Buzzsumo is a useful tool to explore which pieces of content are popular on social media around a certain topic. Use it to brainstorm popular topic ideas based on keywords related to your topics. You can also input your own domain name (as I have done in the example above) into the search bar and see at a glance how often and where your content is most shared.
While the quality of your content is a vital factor for successful blogging, how you present your information is also very important. Visuals are a key component of a successful blog. Canva is one of my every-day go-to tools when I am creating visuals. It’s so easy and quick to use it with a multitude of layout options, fonts, images and illustrations to choose from. Use the pre-set blog template to create header images for your bog.
Click to Tweet is a cool free tool which generates one-click tweet boxes or links that can be shared through your website, your blog, or via email. It’s a powerful way to increase social shares and highlight quotes, stats, and key takeaways for your content marketing. It’s also available as a handy Chrome extension.
According to Copyblogger, on average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. Your headline is the first (perhaps only) impression you make on a prospective reader. Use the EMV headline analyzer to calculate the emotional value of your headlines to create titles which will resonate with your audience.
FreePik offers users, high-quality graphic designs: exclusive illustrations and graphic resources. It operates on a freemium business model which means, the majority of the resources offered at Freepik can be used for free, only having to credit the author of the illustration to Freepik. In addition, for a small fee, you can subscribe to the Premium plan and use the illustrations without any accreditation whatsoever.
A proofreading tool which clears your copy of all unnecessary copy. Just paste your text into the editor and you’ll get an analysis that highlights lengthy, complex sentences, adverbs, passive voice, and common errors.
This site contains images (mostly from Flickr) organized by themes such as inspiration, recreation, and ambient. On the site, you’ll also find free templates, icons, button makers, and more.
Life of Pix offers free, high-quality images that are available for personal and commercial use. Each comes with a helpful color palette so you can plan your visuals accordingly.
This is a cool tool that enables you to turn your blog posts into slideshow-type videos in minutes. The free plan includes unlimited videos, access to 10 million video files, and 480p-quality video with the Lumen5 watermark. You can also upload your own logo. Upgrading to the Pro plan ($49/month) lets you remove the Lumen5 branding, upload your own watermark and outro, and more.
Simply input your blog post’s url and Lumen 5 will import the text and images from that post and auto-create your video. You can then edit it, swap out images, upload other images and add music before you hit publish. The video above is one I created with Lumen 5 from an original blog post
Pexels provides over 3,800 high-resolution photos, collated from other free image sites — making it one of the largest free image directories. Pexels has also added a large library of stock videos to its site also under the Creative Commons license. Use the site’s list of popular searches to find the most in-demand stock video.
Pikwizard hosts over 100,000 completely free images, with over 20,000 of those exclusive to the site. The site has a good selection of medical-themed images. The site is particularly good for aesthetic procedures and dentistry-related images.
With PhotoFunia you can edit photos online for free in a matter of seconds resulting in high-quality photo collages. As the name suggests, this tool is a lot of fun to use. It helps you make a mark with your photos by incorporating your photos into mock-ups of background images including billboards, magazine covers, and movie posters.
Similar to Bit.ly, this url shortner tool allows you to enhance every link you share (whether your own content or someone else’s) with a call to action (CTA). When people click on the Sniply-generated link, they can view the article you shared and see a CTA.
If you like sharing quotes on your blog you can take advantage of their ready to add quotes feature. It will save you a lot of time. You can save, download or share up to 10 images per month, for free.
This tool takes a sample of your writing and calculates the number of sentences, words, syllables, and characters. It then takes the output of these numbers and plugs them into 7 popular readability formulas to help you find out the reading level and grade level of your materials and help you to determine if your audience can read what you have written.
Quroa is a question and answer platform where you can either ask a question about your topic or simply do a search using your topic keyword to find what people are asking about that topic. It’s a super place for market research.
Unsplash gives you access to a bank of 50,000+ free-to-use photos. All photos are licensed under Creative Commons Zero, which means you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes, without asking permission from or providing attribution to the photographer or Unsplash.
Do you have any favourite tools to enhance your blogging? I’d love to hear about them if you do.
Health Care Social Media 