Strengthening your social media

strategy and use

Ana VallejoCommunications manager, Myeloma Patients Europe (MPE)

vallejo@mpeurope.org @avallejo_

What do you need social media for?

• Visibility for your organisation and your campaigns

• Improving the dissemination of your activities

• Interacting with your stakeholders

• Reach new patients and new stakeholders

• Increase traffic to your website

Tips to communicate on social media

Your organisation’s social media profiles are not your personal ones

Be careful in social media conversations when the topic discussed may be controversial or

problematic

Don’t argue. Keep an appropriate and polite position when disagreeing with others’ opinions

Be as clear as you can and use examples

Be transparent and don’t delete bad comments

Don’t give personal opinions, you are talking on behalf of your organisation

Prepare some statements in advance reviewed by your organisation’s board or CEO

Try to be as polite as you can and try to avoid confrontation. Make sure you have enough arguments and objective data before having any discussion

Try to write easy messages to avoid misunderstandings

If someone writes a bad reply, don’t delete it. It would mean you are trying to hide something. If you delete disrespectful comments, explain the reason.

And…

Make it visual!

• Our brain is programmed to retain visual content

• Do you know people retain 95% of the content they watch compare to 10% from reading texts?

→ Use pictures

→ Use videos

Twitter• Twitter is the most dynamic social network. Thousands of messages are shared every day. It requires more

number of tweets per day compared with other social networks

• More information using less characters

o Include pictures to save characters and add mentions in the picture

o Use threads

o Videos

• It was common to start a tweet with a period before a mention (.@username). Twitter assumed that this tweet is part of a conversation between two users and automatically only includes that tweet in our timeline if we are followers of both accounts. With the new Twitter rules the period is no longer needed. Replies will still be seen by those following both users.

• Don’t forget create a hashtag (#) in your campaigns! – It will help also to measure your impact

Facebook

• Personal profiles vs fan pages – Use a fan page for your organisation!

• You will need a personal profile to be the administrator of your fan page

• Add more than one administrator or have one of the 5 different roles: administrator, editor, moderator, advertiser and analyst

• Lear more about these roles on Facebook Help Centre

Facebook

Bear in mind Facebook tools to create and manage your campaign

• Schedule content

• Live video

• Stories

• Surveys

• Facebook profile picture frame → a very good tool to disseminate a campaign

Facebook• Facebook profile picture frames can be useful

to disseminate your campaign (E.g. the CML example)

• You can create the frame login with Facebook account or on behalf of your organisation. FB will have to approve your frame so it can be available for all FB users

• The visibility of the frame will depend on the picture selected by the user

Social media campaigns• Plan a social media campaign for a specific project or as a general campaign for your

organisation

• Campaigns are usually developed at a short term (a week or even a day - e.g. Awareness Day)

• Especially if you use your social media profiles within a specific campaign, planning what you would like to share will help you

• Bear in mind what your target is (age, what kind of social media profile they use, how and when they use social media…)

• Creating a calendar will help you to plan what kind of recourses you will need (videos, infographics, pictures…) and even programme your posts in advance → e.g. Hootsuite

Planning your social media campaign

Social

media

managment

–

Hootsuite

• Hootsuite allows you to manage several social media profiles from one account (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest)

• Programme in advance your posts (Facebook already allows you to programme posts but other networks like Twitter don’t)

• A planner to programme content of different social networks in the same calendar

• Monitor a specific hashtag (#). Useful for specific campaigns to gather all comments under a specific hashtag

Make it visual - Infographics

• Professional designers use different programmes to create infographics

• There are free platforms that can help you to create simple infographics easily. E.g. Canva, picktochart…

• They have templates to create infographics, brochures, business cards…

• They are not exclusive but you will get an exclusive design by modifying the layout, fonts, colours…

• You will find different plans depending on the platform you use

Canva

Canva

Canva

Make it visual! - Videos

• There are several programmes you can use to create videos

• Most of them require some knowledge in order to use them

• There are platforms to create animated videos easily (animaker, powtoon…)

• You will find different plans but most of them have a free version

Make it visual! - Videos

• Animated videos are a good option to give more visibility to your posts and tweets (e.g. MPE webinar on CAR-T cell treatment)

Powtoon

Social media toolkit• Check the MPE social media toolkit

• This toolkit is a support resource for patient associations. Its purpose is to give guidance and information about social media management in order to increase the visibility of your activities.

• Some tips to get the greatest benefit from social networks reducing the risks that they may have for your organisation

• Guidelines on how to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and social management tools such as Hootsuite and TweetDeck https://www.mpeurope.org/wh

at-we-do/publications/toolkits

Now, let’s create a campaign!• Choose your activity (e.g. an awareness day, corporate campaign for your

organisation, early diagnosis campaign)

• Choose your objectives – What would like to achieve with your campaign? (Improve awareness, visibility, increase the number of followers…)

• Based on your target, choose the social media profiles you would like to use

• Are you planning a one-day campaign? A week? A month?

• What materials would you use?

• What activities would you plan on social media for this campaign?

• How would you measure the impact of your campaign?

You have 20 minutes!

Thank you!