Content + Community Engagement
Hello,
Give me eight-to-thirty seconds! I want to make you smile, or give you something ponder. Let me connect you with like-minded individuals, and help you feel heard. As a social media marketer, it’s my job to make our digital world a better tool for consumers.
Social media isn’t about Instagram models anymore. Today, more and more consumers are using digital platforms to set a positive tone for their day and learn something new – people want to be inspired. So what’s going to make your consumer audience feeling good, and keep them coming back for more?
If you don’t have anything nice to say, say something nice anyway.
– Olivia Barton
In order to brighten one’s day as a social media manager, you must be empathetic and relatable. It’s also crucial that you’re equipped with a great sense of humor and exceptional writing skills.
If you’re an empath, you can read the social climate better than most, and likely thrive on social media. Empaths are key players in customer service and damage control; these types easily pick up mood shifts and pivot more readily than your average social media specialist.
How do your target customers’ interests compare to yours? If you relate well to your target audience, you have a higher likelihood of sharing relevant stories on behalf of your brand. You’ll come across technical difficulties or frustrated humans every day in this role, and sometimes the most skilled communicator can have an off day. We swing for the fences… and if we miss, we have to laugh, learn and persevere. Don’t give up. Keep sharing.
The best social media marketers read the room before contributing to the conversation.
Take notes and don’t be afraid to ask questions. When you are able to relate to and embody your target demographic, communicate well (and often) and continue to listen, you’ll be fully equipped to represent your brand on social media.
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Find my best social media work on these channels…
for dozens of brands, including…
Dozens of Brands Served, A Decade Of Lessons Learned
Over the past ten years, I have set up / optimized, planned out, queued up content for, monitored, reported on, and chatted with customers via social media.
Below, find 11 of my greatest takeaways from working in this niche. While my expertise comes primarily from working in sports medicine, education, tourism and tech, these key tactics are applicable to every industry.
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1. Never forget to check the DMs
I met some amazing photographers and influencers in the DMs, whom I ended up working with for several years. Their content was often better than the photography our team shot in-house, so the relationships you make on social media can be a godsend for business.
Special shoutout to my favorite photographers Luke Tevebaugh and Sherman Edwards.
The longer you work with people, the better your collaborations become.
Working with photographers and models can be tricky. I’ve found working with in-house shared services teams can be significantly more difficult than outsourcing lifestyle photography.
Beat a learning curve by finding a partner that makes your job easier and hold onto them.
2. Don’t forget where the influencers live.
They’re online right now and potentially buried in your DMs. From Olympic athletes to the average consumer with a story to tell, the DMs are worth a significant portion of our time and energy. I get my content for the blog and social in the DMs. I plan promotional blitzes with other brands in the DMs. It’s very much like thrift store shopping; you need to sort through a lot of things you don’t want to find the priceless ones.
3. Post + Repost Stories
Post them as often as possible. Tag and credit models, photographers or other contributors when you can. Tag the location. Tag the product or link to your page. Use stickers and hashtags. Don’t sleep on stories; if you’re going to use social media as a tool, take note on where the traffic is, follow it, and take your customers to your website.
The #HomeGym really exploded at the beginning of the pandemic, which carried many health and fitness brands through history’s shortest recession. The #StayHome button kept our brand at the front of story feeds, the #HomeGym hashtag helped drive traffic, and the web link (or product tag) made selling on social media easy.
The quicker and easier it is to buy on social media, the more sales we’ll see. Just remember to keep links, integrations and cookies updated on your channels and website.
There’s that #StayHome sticker (keeping our stories at the top of the feed), the “Remote” geotag for location-browsers, the industry hashtag #SportsMedicine for our B2B traffic, and the CTA link to our website. 👉
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remember … the best stories are user-generated, on-trend, and (oftentimes) evergreen
From social listening and community engagement for the #RockTape brand, I couldn’t miss the facial taping trend – dozens videos, images and stories about taping faces to treat and prevent wrinkles were posted weekly throughout 2019-2020. Though this topic had no place in our brand story or marketing strategy, when the topic began to gain traction (especially with our brand, due to the name-drop in this viral video) I was able to capitalize on the medical spa consumers’ interest in our brand by re-sharing these types of stories and adding relevant hashtags, like #botox. Never forget to link stories directly to products or relevant webpages to boost sales!
Adding the location is another searchable customization that adds to the story’s clout on social media. Tagging the content creators in your stories are a professional necessity – don’t forget to tag them!
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Hashtags like #rehab can be too vague for the diverse medical community, so a great practice for using hashtags in medical marketing is labeling the dysfunction, treatment or condition. To this point, using and following the medical term #edema has proven to be an evergreen, successful, heavy-traffic yielding hashtag to utilize for RockTape social media marketing. I found this video on TikTok under the hashtag #RockTape and reposted it through our Meta channels (Facebook and Instagram) as stories, using the sticker hashtag #edema, tagging the content creator (a medical professional) and the location of their practice (for geo-browsing traffic).
Always link your stories to your Meta product catalog or directly to your product pages.
4. Compile trending content, and schedule it thoughtfully.
#Vaccinations
RockTape may be used to treat swelling and inflammation, so many of the RockTape medical professionals in our community taped their own vaccination sites to speed recovery.
I compiled a few to share for #WorldHealthDay in 2021, fishing for more traffic.
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#WomensHistoryMonth + #AthleticTrainingMonth
Embrace social media holidays – especially when you can combine and compound their relevance and clout into a single post.
5. Rerun the best of your brand.
Epic photos are evergreen. When you recycle them, you solidify your brand vision.
Space out reposts at least a year and a half. Not everybody has seen the epic photo nor remembers the story behind it. We get better yearly, as do our captions and engagement returns.
6. Keep organized + take inventory.
When You Need More Content… Just Ask For Some
In this profession, the more organized you are, the better. As a marketer in the sports medicine industry, I had a folder for every sport, every product – every body part. An excellent marketing tool for me to keep organized has been Google Drive and Pinterest. If you don’t have the luxury of using a Mac or Google Drive, download the Pinterest pinning plugin and check out how I organized our Pinterest page.
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Although RockTape is commonly used in prenatal bodywork, there had been a shortage of professional pregnancy photography at RockTape since I started managing social media in 2015. So when photographer Sherman Edwards offered us a shoot with a handful of influencers in 2017, I scoured them all and jumped at the chance for a pregnancy photoshoot featuring RockTape and TriggerPoint products.
For a sliver of one brand’s budget, I retained specialized evergreen marketing photography I constantly reused for editorials on prenatal care, Mother’s Day campaigns for two brands in my category.
Contests are a great tactic for inciting engagement and building your content library. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need.
7. Pepper in some actual marketing… but not too much.
Actual marketing assets in social media should be used sparingly, as they drive the least traffic and engagement. Save these for rebrands, sales and announcements only. People want to see real life on social media – this is a tool for lifestyle showcasing and should be more relatable than it is clean.
8. Epic quotes get epic votes. Use sparingly, but with passion.
#NationalCoachesDay
Athletic trainers and coaches are one of the key RockTape demographics, so of course I included #NationalCoachesDay on my content calendar.
I pulled the image from unsplash.com and tagged the photographer, because they should always get credit – especially if it’s free. Bonus points for tagging all your favorite coach influencers.
9. Network with influencers
10. User-generated content is king.
Take it from the fans.
Monitor what your fans are tagging you in, and bank the best to reuse when the time is right.
Transitioning from a consumer-focused health and fitness marketing strategy to a medical-focused B2B marketing strategy was a project which took months to perfect. Typically, you won’t get the same engagement from your audience during a drastic transition like this one was. Take a look at the vast differences of content within five years below.
Health and Fitness Focus
Medical, B2B Focus
11. Chronicle company-sponsored events
… big and small.
Olivia Barton 