8 Tips for Health Care & Pharmaceutical Companies on Facebook
August 8, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
The Facebook Marketing Series is supported by Buddy Media, Power Tools for Facebook. Are you posting blindly? Use our insights to help you deliver the right content at the right time and get the results you need. Download our data report now.
Pharmaceutical and health care companies have been understandably cautious about using social media for marketing purposes.
While the FDA provides little concrete guidance, some social media marketing is permissible.
Here are a few tips and best practices to consider if your health care company is embarking on a Facebook presence.
1. Is Your Product Consumer-Facing?
Determine if your brand, drug or service is “consumer facing” — whether consumers are the ones making the purchase decisions. This factor applies more to over-the-counter products that consumers can buy themselves (such as Advil) in stores and less to prescription drugs for which doctors are the ones writing the prescriptions. Consumers tend to go online to research products before they buy — and they want to be able to reach the manufacturers directly. Physicians, on the other hand, don’t (and can’t legally) talk about work on Facebook. So, pharma advertisers should determine if social media marketing is even relevant to their product in the first place.
2. Provide Useful Information
People go to Facebook to socialize, not to “friend” Lipitor. If pharma companies are to earn the attention of any modern consumer, they should provide useful information and value to the consumers instead of asking them to do things or give personal information. “Information” includes accurate details about the product, including side effects and risks.
3. Ask Intelligent and Related Questions
Once consumers voluntarily give their attention and visit the pharma companies’ Facebook pages, then pharma has the right to ask intelligent questions and listen to the feedback from the community. Instead of telling, asking and listening is a way to earn the dialogue with consumers and fans.
4. Have Real Experts Lead Discussions (Not Marketing or PR Reps)
Consumers are very savvy and have learned to sniff out marketing and “bad acting.” When they interact with advertisers, they expect complete transparency and candor. This goes for pharma as well. So instead of having marketing or PR representatives field questions from users, it’s important for pharma companies to have real experts (scientists, MDs, etc.) answer questions and concerns from consumers. If your company doesn’t currently do this, organizational processes should be put in place to enable it.
5. Create a Publishing Schedule
Many brands have made forays into social media. But beyond just buying display ads on Facebook, it is important to have something new to talk about periodically. This not only means creating valuable content and providing information about new products, but it also can be asking the right questions. The key is to do this consistently and regularly, thus creating a publishing schedule of both content and questions that can be delivered through your Facebook page. This way, users have an expectation for new content on a regular schedule, which will bring them back to the page and give them a reason to talk and share.
6. Establish the Right Success Metrics
“Doing social media” does not mean placing display ads on social media sites like Facebook. You need to engage and measure success to see what works. But the number of fans or Likes are not the best success metrics. Consumer engagement and vibrance of the community are more important and yield more value over time. So for those pharma companies that are using Facebook for marketing, tips two through five above will collectively enable you to better engage the community and create longer-term ties. Metrics that involve actual actions of the users — the number of conversations, the number of repeat visits, the pages viewed per visit — are better than one-off actions like clicking the “like” button.
7. Make a Social Media Commitment (Not a Campaign)
Social media is media created by the conversations of people. Advertisers have to earn the right to participate in these conversations by creating a community with valuable content. What your followers say — whether good or bad — is now permanently recorded online for all to see. So advertisers should be prepared to make a “social media commitment” instead of a “social media campaign.” The efforts in social media should not stop as if it’s a marketing campaign. As advertisers embark on social media “commitments,” they should see them as the opportunity to create relationships and assets of lasting value, both for consumers and pharmaceutical companies.
8. Monitor For Adverse Events
Finally, for the pharmaceutical industry in particular, advertisers must monitor for adverse events in the sites and pages they own and control — including their own Facebook pages. This has seemed an onerous task in the past, but monitoring tools and services are making it easier to collect, detect and act. In addition, there are four criteria that must be met to constitute a reportable event.
The FDA requires that four criteria be reported in each adverse event report:
- 1. Who is the patient affected?
- 2. Who reported the event?
- 3. What was the adverse event?
- 4. What was the product that is suspected of causing the bad reaction?
Most comments on social media sites do not meet all four criteria. So companies should use the tools to gather relevant, potentially reportable comments and have their own medical and legal departments review and provide guidance.
Conclusion
The use of social media is not only appropriate, but also highly effective and efficient in certain cases. So pharma and health care companies should make plans and take specific steps to leverage social media on platforms like Facebook.
Series Supported by Buddy Media
The Facebook Marketing Series is supported by Buddy Media, Power Tools for Facebook. Are you posting blindly? Use our insights to help you deliver the right content at the right time and get the results you need. Download our data report now.
More Facebook Marketing Resources from Mashable:
- 4 Ways to Set Up a Storefront on Facebook
- HOW TO: Create a Facebook Engagement Policy
- HOW TO: Engage and Mobilize Facebook Fans Beyond the “Like”
- 5 Creative Facebook Places Marketing Campaigns
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Inbox beat-down: How social media rivalry is impeding email deliverability
August 8, 2011 by admin
Filed under Latest Lingerie News
Recently, both Google and Facebook have — within 24 hours of each other — initiated major manoeuvres to become the unequivocal masters of the inbox. With the social media migration deadlock still hanging in the balance after the launch of Google+, the email arena has been primed as the next battlefield between the information superpowers.
In the blue corner: Facebook is now gunning to consolidate its users’ social and email activities all under one roof, re-inventing itself as a major email service provider (ESP) by adding a few frills to its own in-house email service and promoting its use more aggressively.
In the red corner: Google is jostling to catalyse users of minority ESPs to leapfrog to their service and divert sign-ups away from Facebook via its clever “email Intervention” campaign. Centred on the classic friend intervention model, Google is betting on peer pressure to get those “behind-the-times” and “misguided” email users to make the switch, thereby creating a default entry point into its Google+ social network.
Strangely, however, there has been little in-depth reporting done on either development. While some might think that a little, unpronounced fistfight over inbox dominance pales in comparison to the tussle for social media hegemony, both Facebook and Google have products which span the scope of eCommerce and email marketers cannot afford to meet changes in their own backyard with benign neglect.
Email and social are different channels offering different benefits. Twitter and Facebook are great for offering casual connections to brands. For brands that you really want to hear from through opt-in campaigns, email is the right tool for the job. Now that social and email are meshing, however, marketers will need to evolve their techniques to make communications viable for either channel while addressing new adversities.
Google made the first move. They have created emailintervention.com, which is a simple site where Gmail users can send intervention letters to convince their friends to convert. Additionally, a “switch friends to Gmail” tab has been placed next to the settings field inside the inbox zone, channeling users to the same site.
Conversely, challenging major ESPs for their slice of email marketing revenue, Facebook has fully integrated its very own email inbox service into its existing direct messaging platform.
Since May 2011, users have had their own username@facebook.com email address available, to which emails and newsletters can be sent. Facebook is now rolling the product out in full steam and it is ceaselessly prompting users to activate their new Facebook-hosted email box as part of wider FB integrations, which include mobile messaging and video chat.
Just over a month after Google+ was first unveiled, it had signed up well north of 10-million users. Phase one of Google+ was clearly a success, but now comes the challenge of keeping those users around and engaged, and pushing past its current sign-up slump to uplift those treasured metrics and prove that they can stand toe-to-toe with Facebook’s social prowess. To address this gap, Google knows that it will have to pick off long-time users of competing email services to fuel its own growth. Facebook, in turn, hopes to stifle any increase in Gmail’s user numbers while skimming off the top of other major ESPs, with its shiny new mailbox.
Behind the scenes, an unprecedented paradigm shift is happening: Email is no longer a means used to support and punt social media. We are, instead, seeing an equalisation of these channels.
Gmail already provides an excellent environment for email marketing in terms of accurate frame-working for faithful newsletter display and image rendering, as well as enforcing spam protection by utilising reputation and content filtering. Facebook still needs to prove that it can offer users the same level of support and functionality as an ESP.
Sustained efforts from Google and Facebook to redirect all inbox traffic to themselves could spur the largest email client exodus of the decade.
Facebook’s hasty mailbox implementation could see tried and trusted email checks and balances sacrificed in a bid to lure in subscribers faster. Playing footloose and fancy free with deliverability fundamentals might see the majority of email newsletter campaigns sent through their service flounder.
With Google siphoning off as many email users as possible, there should be a noticeable increase in the amount of undelivered (or “bounced”) email sends as time goes on, since a large number of addresses used at other webmail clients could then become defunct.
Given the prevalence of both Facebook and Google, any extensive success in goading email subscribers can upset the proverbial apple-cart for email campaigns, as address lists become slowly invalid and loopholes open up for spammers.
The world of email is all about deliverability since it has a direct impact on your bottom line. Improving email deliverability is a highly specialised and ongoing process. It’s a balancing act involving business, technical practices and management of the greater email organism, inside and outside of your organisation.
According to this deliverability white paper, 17.8 percent of legitimate marketing emails failed to reach subscriber inboxes in Europe and 19.9 percent failed to do so in the USA and Canada last year.
Facebook and Google have both given birth to communications channels that provide services which are breaking down the distinctions between social and email, playing gambits that could alter the chemistry of email marketing and botch deliverability, unless you are intimately familiar with its precepts and intuitively adapting your send stratagems to compensate for social-email advancements.
What taunts ESPs into action is always going to be the subject of who has the most names signed up to their service. Whatever features or platforms you introduce, once show and tell is over, inflating user headcount is the priority. It remains to be seen if the communications heavyweights care more about magnetising new users to their service than how reliably your emails are getting through to intended recipients and how well spam is being fended off.
Image: johnscotthaydon