Where does the patient fall in your social media thinking?

Few people would disagree that strategy is an integral part of any social media engagement.  Despite what many people might assume, social media is not something marketers should engage in without a clear purpose or goal in mind.  But how to arrive at the strategy is less clear.

Traditional marketing metrics become less quantifiable in social media.  You can’t measure the success of a campaign because campaign thinking fails in social media.  You can’t focus solely on bottom-line impact or your efforts will come across as blatant attempts to promote.  This leaves many marketers in a pickle—without a point to work backwards from; forming a coherent strategy is a difficult task.

But it doesn’t have to be.  Too many marketers walk into social media engagement planning focused on how to get the most eyeballs.  If that were the only measure that guided social media strategy it would quickly become extinct.  There are much more efficient ways to simply hitting eyeballs than using social media.

The better approach is to focus on Return on Health (ROH) and consider the behavior of your patient.  Thinking first about the behavior of your patient will guide you to the right platforms.  For example, if you are dealing with an ailment that generally impacts children, what is the first thing a parent will likely do upon learning their child is inflicted with this ailment?  Most parents search for answers and will head to Google to find them.  The trick is to ask yourself, what type of information are they looking for in this search?  If they are searching for insight on treatment options, severity and past experiences, you can gear your social media efforts to reflect that.  You should also survey what online sources of information already exist.  Have you considered Google Health as a source of information for patients?  Better still, have you tracked down the sources of information that feed into Google Health and ensured its accuracy?  If you are not proactively addressing these questions you are leaving your online presence to chance.  What about a platform such as Yahoo! Answers?  Have you scanned the discussion taking place there to get a sense for the sentiment about either your brand or the common concerns of dealing with a particular ailment?

The bottom is this: social media strategy too often focuses on superficial measures as its guide.  Metrics like unique visitors per month, pages viewed per visitor and bounce rate should not inform our course of action.  These are only surface observations and are weak when used as guiding lights.  Social media strategy should start with the patient.

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