When is the right time to take the social media plunge?

It’s not often I have to convince clients of the need to establish social media accounts. Most are eager to get started. Tomorrow. Yesterday, even. Some have already started, and have been either overwhelmed or disappointed by the slow trickle of followers or the slow-down in activity. Where did they go wrong?

As the old proverb -- and country singer Garrett Hedlund -- note, timing is everything.

So when is the right time to jump on social media?

It’s a wise question to ask. Similar to marriage, social media is a serious commitment, not to be taken lightly. (Yeah, that’s right, I just compared social media to marriage, though thankfully it’s much cheaper than Susie Sue’s wedding.)

Before you answer the When, you should consider the other 4 W’s:

• Why are you doing it?
• Where will you appear?
• Who will be doing it?
• What do you want to share?

(Read to the end and you may be rewarded with more than just fabulous new insight)

WHY?

Don’t let peer pressure force you down a path you’re not prepared to take. Just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to. There should be a reason -- or, ideally, several -- for investing your company’s time, resources and reputation on social media. Some of these reasons might be: brand awareness; establishing your company’s public-facing ‘personality’; engaging with existing and potential clients/customers/investors; inserting yourself into current conversations; establishing your company as thought leaders in your industry; attracting attention from media, who are increasingly eschewing the traditional press release in favor of social media story sourcing.

Establishing your social media objectives and setting a few goals (lots of post views, lots of engagement through likes and shares, increased traffic to your website, lead generation, etc) is super important to help you assess which audiences you want to target, where they are most likely to be found, what you will consider as success, and how much you are willing to invest to achieve it.

WHERE?

This brings us to where. Once you establish your target audience, figure out where you are most likely to reach them, and which content they are craving on each channel. 

I usually recommend LinkedIn to start. It’s popular for business-to-business networking, of course, and as a forum for company updates. Potential employees will be inspecting your page, as will investors. LinkedIn accounts are pretty easy to maintain, with an expected post frequency of just 1-2 a week. These posts are also easily overlooked, however, with an algorithm that favors posts by people. So a successful social media strategy, especially for small start-ups and companies where the leadership team is the face of the company, should include personal articles authored by those leaders, which are then shared on the company page, leveraging their professional network as well as the company’s.

Stay tuned for more top tips for leaders on LinkedIn

Twitter should be your second stop. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 80% of active Twitter users are affluent millennials. But don’t discount other audiences, and the passive consumers of Twitter content. Most savvy searchers these days will visit your social media accounts to check out your company. Your Twitter feed is updated way more often than your website, and a quick scroll through recent posts will give the viewer a perhaps more authentic taste of what your company is about.  

I consider Facebook and Instagram as the big leagues of social media, and perhaps out of reach of many smaller companies. It’s quite difficult for business accounts to succeed on Facebook and Instagram without phenomenal content, a big bandwidth, and/or advertising dollars. That said, the reach you can get on these platforms is huge. It’s a tempting path, but one which you should be very thoughtful about before taking.  

WHO?

In the three years I’ve been working with the life sciences communications agency Bioscribe, I’ve helped dozens of clients manage their Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram accounts. These companies range in size from start-ups to multinational corporations. Some have in-house marketing teams, others rely on Bruce from reception/HR/IT to feed the feeds, and still others give me the keys to the social media castle. 

Let’s be realistic here. A good, effective social media presence takes effort, especially in the beginning. You can probably reduce that effort over time, once you’ve established a good cache of content and a reasonable workflow, but you should definitely be mindful of your business’s bandwidth before diving in. Bring in help if you need it. Or, delay the launch until you are able to create a few months worth of what I call ‘evergreen’ content -- pre-approved posts that can be broadcast at pretty much any time, to ensure you have a continuous cadence of material at regular intervals. 

How much time does it take? It depends on several factors: The quantity and quality of content you have, the frequency of activity you want to maintain, the amount of engagement you want to achieve. It is possible for a seasoned pro to do it all in as little as 5 hours a month -- two hours at the beginning of the month drafting and scheduling posts plus a few minutes each day checking the feed, responding to any comments, and sharing/reposting relevant timely content. Ideally, however, you’d budget for at least 10-15 hours a month for a lively, active account.

WHAT?

The type and amount of content you want to share, and the assets you have available to you -- now and in the future -- are important in determining when you are ready to start sharing. Content can include: press releases; news coverage; blog posts; educational material on the website; white papers or technical documents; tutorials; videos; webinars; financing announcements; promotional campaigns; job opportunities; employee profiles; comments on current events or trending topics in your field; etc. Ideally, it would be a good mix of all of the above, alongside shares of interesting news articles, resources, activity from other thought leaders/influencers, and company mentions. 

Does this content already exist? If so, can you supplement it? Are you likely to have a continuous drip of content? If not, can you create it? 

Is your website up to scratch? If not, you may want to hold off on content intended to drive traffic to the site, opting for a minimal amount of relevant news shares or links to videos, etc. 

You may have enough content to sustain your LinkedIn feed, but not enough to support the higher frequency expectations of Twitter (around 3-5 tweets a week). That’s OK. It’s better to dip your feet in one channel than dive into two and drown. 

WHEN?

You’ve considered each of these questions, so what is the final answer? It will differ for each company, obviously, but here’s a (totally fabricated) example that might help pull things together.

Consider Tomato Pharma, a spin-out from the Professor Plant Lab which is in the early stages of developing a cure for gastric cancer using a tomato-based biotherapeutic.  

Tomato Pharma wants to have a presence on LinkedIn to keep its investors and peer network up to date about financing announcements and clinical trials. But CEO Henry Heinz decides to save Twitter for when they are further along the drug development process and seeking increased brand awareness and attention from potential users, patient and medical groups and the media. 

They spend the time in between doing a bit of research (checking out the competition, picking the most relevant/popular hashtags, reading a few feeds to keep abreast of the conversation and see what gets the most engagement), setting up the new account with appealing photos and bio, and creating a cache of content. This content should then be dripped onto the shiny new Twitter account about a week before an official virtual launch, which they’ve strategically planned to coincide with the annual GI cancer conference where they will be releasing their Phase 3 trial results. 

Those few initial tweets might not get a ton of traction, but they are intended to populate the page so that there’s something to see when Tomato Pharma starts its drive to recruit followers. This can also be started in that pre-launch week. Start by following -- and retweeting if possible -- the Twitter accounts of KOLs in your field, as well as your investors, collaborators, employees, trade organizations, top journals and journalists, etc. Then hit the lists -- the lists of the KOLs’ followers, and your competitors’ followers, and the list of followers that Twitter suggests, and the accounts who are super active in your relevant hashtags… etc, etc. The more you engage with and include other Twitter users in your posts, the more they are likely to reciprocate. 

Congrats! You’ve made it! Well done! 

As a reward, I’ve included a snapshot of my social media spreadsheet template, which is a super handy way to create, plan and share your content internally. Check out the formula line at the top to get the code I use to automatically track character count (aim for ~250 for tweets with links). I include a review column that can be used for those who want to get the posts approved before posting, and columns at the end to track basic analytics, which I usually update at the end of each month. I also use fill colors to mark posts which have gone live.

 Stay tuned for other top tips and secret tricks (such as the site I used to source free-to-use photos and the tool I used to create the Tomato Pharma graphic), and feel free to send any burning questions my way (and/or suggestions for what you’d like to read about next).