Boost Your mHealth Marketing: Reuse Your Social Media Content

As an mHealth company, it’s vital that you stay on top your industry’s trends and listen to what your customers are saying via social media and other channels. But it’s also important to engage your audiences on as many levels as possible to keep the conversation going and to maintain your presence. If this seems like a daunting process to you, think about ways you can use your existing “content” on a variety of channels. Instead of reinventing the wheel, it’s more effective to cross-leverage that information. You can save time, money and staff hours by “repurposing” what you have, in essence, and by creating a content ladder of information.

I read an article Jay Baer wrote for the Social Media Examiner website that made some great points, and I’d like to share his suggestions:

5 Ways to Reuse Social Media to Boost mHealth Marketing

Use “taxonomy” wisely
Jay describes taxonomy as “the words and phrases used to describe products and services.” A poor example of taxonomy is the yellow pages, Jay says. He’s right, you know. Have you ever tried to look for “car parts?” It’s not under “cars,” it’s not under “parts,” it’s somewhere in the “automobiles” section … maybe.

When you write content for any online media remember to use words wisely. Think about what terms you would use to search and use those words in your content, both in the headlines and body text.

Use the most relevant keywords
A word or phrase that matches your search to the results is known as the keyword. Jay suggests there are three ways to find the best “keywords” or search terms to use in your online content:

1. Do a keyword search of your website’s top keywords using Google Analytics
2. See how your website is doing through social mentions
3. Look at Twitter lists—Jay says that, “How your company or product is referred to in consumer-created Twitter lists can yield important taxonomy insights.”

Search for inspiration
Do a Google search of your company name, your Twitter account name and your products from time to time. Try it on other search engines as well. I do this on occasion and it helps you to see what else is out there, and it may even give you some ideas for new ways to engage your audience.

Create a consistent frequency equation
It sounds complicated, but what Jay means is this—figure out how often you want your content to appear in the different outlets, and then create a formula and monitor how it’s working. Here’s Jay’s example:

* Twitter (5x/day) * Facebook (2x/day) * Blog (3x/week) * Email (1x/week)

Track your content
There are several ways you can do this, but Jay suggests using bit.ly. This is Jay’s plan: create a piece of content and post it on the first part of your equation (Twitter, as shown above) and see how popular it was after posting. This is not a scientific approach as there are many factors that will influence the content’s appeal, but try tracking it at different times of day, different days of the week, and track your results to see what works best.

Tweak and Re-utilize
Following the formula Jay suggests, once you find that a piece of content is really popular on the first part (Twitter), you should then take that content and change it up for other media outlets. My firm does this for our clients and for our own social media, and we sometimes switch it up to see what works best. You know the content is appreciated, and that if you spend the time to “update” it for various other purposes it’s likely to be well-received.

The point is: create a good piece of content, and then use it in other formats for maximum effect. It’s actually a really effective use of your or your staff’s time. You don’t need to write new content for every social media product — take advantage of what you already have.