mHealth Entrepreneurs: Are You Listening on Social Media?

Creating killer marketing content informs, inspires, and moves your audience to action. Your content drives sales.

Yet, how do you break through all the noise today? 

Delivering engaging, entertaining, inspiring, and motivating content requires listening.

Actually, it starts with listening.

Most marketers view social media as a platform to amplify and promote their content. Am old school push marketing mentality to social media prevails. The power social media holds in learning how to engage, educate, inspire, and moving prospects and clients is missed.

Mastering social media and content marketing demands a listening first approach. The leader of the business sets the tone for a listening first strategy to social media and content marketing.

Why Listen First on Social Media?

Nearly all industries are actively involved in the social media scramble. Yet health and wellness has been slow to embrace social media. While healthcare and wellness lags other industries, the opportunity to connect on social media remains. Patients and healthcare professionals want to connect and are seeking real value on social media.

While people are hungry for healthcare information, too many times businesses fail to deliver. 

Why?

Too many social media efforts are tactics driven with a focus on instant ROI. Social media efforts focused on numbers of Followers, Likes, and Tweets somehow magically resulting in a flurry of sales is a pipe dream. Sadly, that’s what many so-called social media gurus have sold and many businesses fell for the instant sales with little work for free false promise.

Social media only works when a solid strategic foundation is built. A solid strategic foundation includes clearly stated goals and objectives for the business. A deep understanding of what the market wants… the problems the market faces and the value placed upon the solutions… is poured in. Insights into the conversation the market is having, the questions they ask, the language they use in asking questions and describing problems cements the marketing message in place.

 Social media is an excellent listening tool. With social media you can discover the questions your market asks, what value they seek, and gain invaluable insights into the language used to describe the problems and solutions.

Stop wasting time on social media. End the guessing about social media ROI.

Start listening. Set up a Listening Post

Social Media Listening: 30 Minutes a Day

Here’s the blueprint for busy mHealth entrepreneurs to listen, engage, and lead their organizations’ social media efforts.

1. Set up a Listening Post. Use tools such as Google Alerts, Feedly, Zite, Twitter Alerts, and Social Mention to automatically feed information about the conversation happening in your market.

Spend 5 minutes scanning these resources for relevant content to share with your network that adds value.

2. Scan your Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+ News Streams. Spend 5 minutes to share relevant content.

3. Share 3-6 links to articles with your insights. Use Hootsuite or Social Oomph to spread your shares throughout the business day rather than a burst of 8 Tweets or shares in your stream at once. Time investment: 10 minutes.

4. Engage- Add your comments and insights on 2-5 social media posts or Tweets. 5 minutes daily.

5. Share your content- Use Hootsuite or Social Oomph to share your Tweets, Linkedin, Facebook, and Google+ posts. Post first on your Business Accounts and Pages. Re-Tweet and Share your Business account social activity using your social media personal accounts. 5 minutes daily.

6. Encourage all your team members to follow your lead. Have everyone in your business follow this 30 minute blueprint on social media.

7. Once a week, evaluate your activity- What worked? What drove visits to your site? What built more followers or social media engagement? What did you learn about your market and the market messaging?

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