The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on April 12th, 2011 by tasha
The big concern about Facebook and other social media is that it takes time. Indeed, the purpose of a Fan page, blog or Twitter account is to develop relationships and community with your fans, subscribers and followers. Just as it takes time to have meaningful conversations, it takes time to create engaging posts. And you don’t develop trust and rapport by simply talking about yourself. Like any good friend, you need to be giving out at least as much energy as you are taking in.
You need to regularly offer content that inspires or educates your target audience.
According to an ExactTarget social marketing study:
Even as a non-profit, if your hand is always out asking for money or time, more than you are giving away information and useful resources, you will lose followers.
So how do successful social marketers create engaging content in a manageable amount of time?
They become “Content Curators.” Because social networking is essentially distinguishing yourself through your content, you need to care for your social presence like a curator cares for an exhibit at a museum. (Facebook has sometimes been called “The Museum of the Self.” This makes the content curator analogy even more appropriate.)
The curator draws together pieces of art from different sources, each one a gem, and assembles them into an exhibit that as a whole inspires the visitors, draws crowds, and promotes membership to the museum. There is also a very practical side to curation: While the exhibit requires creativity, the curator does need to work within a budget and timeline.
It is the same for curating a social media site. Posts are assembled from a variety of sources, working together to create a whole that inspires and educates visitors, generates leads, and promotes LIKES, follows or subscribers. And it must all be done within a budget and timeline.
To accomplish their goals, successful social marketers follow some basic rules of thumb:
As an elder care professional, I would suggest that your target audience is family caregivers. Boomers are starting to robustly embrace Facebook. (According to Pew Internet data, approximately 33% of middle-age individuals are now using social networks).
Determine a list of topics that will be of interest to Boomer daughters and sons. In the realm of family caregiving, this would mean posts pertaining to the care of elders. But it also means presenting information to help manage the stress and challenges of being a family caregiver. Dementia, paying for care, and tips for handling daily life with chronic or serious conditions are just some of the many posts that would be welcomed by family caregivers.
Create a Content Calendar. According to Daniel Zarella, author of The Facebook Marketing Book, you want to plan and compose your posts ahead of time. Create a calendar so you will know what you will post on each day of the coming week. Give yourself a specific time each week to get in the social media headset, to think like a curator, and compose the next week’s posts. For truly thoughtful posts, it’s much easier to do several at once than to try spontaneously each day to say something meaningful when you are in a rush to meet other deadlines.
Post consistently. You must get in the habit of regularly making meaningful posts. Each channel has a culture of its own with an expected frequency:
Many people find it easiest to set a specific time aside each day to do the actual posting. (You can use automated programs, but these rank lower on the search results than posts that are submitted manually.) On a rushed day, you can simply copy/paste the text from your Content Calendar. But because this is the social network, you also want to respond to comments made on previous posts and take time to look at your News Feed and make meaningful contributions to conversations happening on the pages of allied businesses. If you are seen only to broadcast out and not to engage with others, you will quickly fall in the category of “marketing to” your audience rather than creating community and “marketing with them.”
Find content that is educational and inspirational. This is the part that takes time. You want to be sure you are posting across a wide range of topics. You also want to vary your content across the categories and keywords you identified earlier in the planning process.
Where do you find content? A recent survey of 150 marketers across many segments of the business world revealed that:
Following the 80:20 rule, successful social marketers tend to use links to other materials for the majority of their posts, adding their own comments for flavor and personality. They save their time and creative energies for that 20% that is about them, where they can really fine tune the call to action (join our list, sign up for our webinar, come to our event, donate to our cause…). In this way, they are able to give their social networking presence the best chance of delivering a return on the investment.
Remember, a key business function of social networking is to generate leads and move people toward action that allows you to engage with them in a more personal way.
A study by Idealware indicated that companies need to spend at least 2 hours/week per social media channel in order to feel it was worth the effort. Companies that spent less than 2 hours a week were generally dissatisfied with the results. Those that spent 9-20 hours per week total, usually working across many channels (e.g., Facebook, Twitter and blogging) seemed to be the most satisfied.
You can conserve time by wisely leveraging the content of others. Mimic the workflow of successful social networkers. Link liberally and paraphrase or make commentary on the work of others. Tons of information already exists. You do not need to re-invent the wheel. You simply need to be smart about finding the info and then adding your own personality to the mix.
To this end, we can help. Check out our Family Caregiver Digest. In our mission to help families connect with the elder care services they need, we looked at the data and asked ourselves what we could do that would best help elder care providers make better use of social media. The answer was to provide links to credible content so you can focus your curation efforts on the targeted, original posts that will help you achieve your specific goals.
You receive an email a week with 5 links to topics of interest to family caregivers. We search the Net for thought-provoking articles and articles on elder care research. For each link, we give you a quick summary of the high points in less than 420 characters. You are certainly welcome to copy and paste these posts directly into your Facebook or blog. But you will get better search optimization, and will be engaging in a manner more true to social media, if you use these as a jumping off point to add your own spin. At the least we suggest you put your own commentary in as to why you think the article is worthwhile, or how it relates to elder care locally in your community.
Try out the Family Caregiver Digest for free. Our goal is to make the Internet easy. If you decide that it saves you time and helps you focus your energy more effectively on your original content, then at the end of the free trial, you can subscribe for the year. The cost works out to less than $1/post. There’s no obligation with the free trial and no automated rollovers to a paid subscription. We simply know you are busy and wanted to do what we could to help you with social media, and at the same time get good information out there to families. See what you think!
A few caveats:
