Social Media Strategy

When the Social Media Specialist left Typenex Medical, the company decided to not refill the position. Since the work was going to be absorbed by my team, I knew a clear direction was needed if social media was going to remain a part of the greater marketing strategy. I volunteered to create a strategy for social media to better integrate it successfully within my team.

To start, I gathered the entire team for a workshop to review the existing social media strategy and success over the past two years. Having some ideas already in mind, I was very interested to hear opinions from other team members who had not been involved prior. Within the workshop, we discussed current pros and cons and reviewed analytics. We discussed social strategies we loved and hated, as well as reviewing our competitors. This group included the design team, which sparked conversation about the workload involved creating content for social.

After reflecting on the workshop and doing some additional research, I identified 3 key points I felt could be accomplished:

Channel Differentiation: Creating a unique personality for each channel
Guidelines to Help Maintain Consistency: Creating clear guidelines for how to achieve channel differentiation
Content Creation Simplified: Addressing workload pitfalls on design team

Channel Differentiation

Prior to my direct involvement, the same content was posted on all channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram) on the same day. This felt insincere and mass-produced in a world where social media is personal. I decided to portray my desired tone for each of our social media channels by creating personas. These personas would be used to help inform the types of content and tone for all the channels.

I assigned this project to two team members, Jessica Sung, copywriter, and Courtney Kim, graphic designer. To kickoff, I shared the tone of each platform by describing each channel as a type of person. For example, the conversation had moments like “Twitter is the politically aware friend who alway quips something quickly that is really fantastic and affecting.” Afterward, I tasked the duo with the goal of bringing these concepts to life. I wanted to see a short collection of graphics and witty copy that was really easy to digest and later reference for each of the channels. With a few easy rounds of revisions to both layout and tone, we were able to finalize the perfect social media personas (see below). Each section includes an introduction, the summary card, and a few examples from existing brands we loved.

Guidelines to Help Maintain Consistency

Once the personas were complete, it was time to apply them to the business. I started with the content breakdowns from the social media personas. The content breakdown illustrated how much content of each theme a channel should have. For example, LinkedIn (as pictured below) should have 60% of its feed focused on industry trends and/or news, 25% showcasing Typenex Medical products, 10% sharing cultural events from within the company, and 5% for job postings. I used the end goal of the personas to determine how each type of content would support and develop the persona’s intended tone. This was done by analyzing existing profiles and the type of content I knew Typenex Medical could produce.

The ratio of content exercise made it easier to decide what type of content would make up those themes. I created what I call a social media matrix to better define what that looked like for each channel. To do that, I made a list of all the possible types of content for Typenex Medical. I organized the list by like items for easy reference. All filled boxes represent content that is appropriate for that channel. Some of the approved posts required more description. For example, casual represents a more relaxed photography style and subject of photo like a candid moment around the coffee pot. While professional represented a more formal style of photography and more serious subject matter like a company meeting or award show. This graphic was wonderful to guide the development of content calendars and curb overexcited ideas.

Content Creation Simplified

Prior to this exercise, there had been frustration regarding the process for requesting social media content, which resulted in an unnecessary amount of work. To strengthen the ROI, I needed to find a better way to design for social. One of the ways I achieved this was to develop consistent types of evergreen content. It allowed the design team to work on social media posts in large batches and during stretches of time when other marketing initiatives were lighter, which saved a lot of time. Freeing up some of that time allowed for the team to create impactful, timely pieces in addition to the evergreen content. As with many B2B companies, Typenex Medical’s main business objectives would not be driven by social media. However, it was still important to have a clean and consistent presence to support brand awareness with content that was easy to create so as to balance time appropriately with other projects.

Employee Spotlight
Employee Spotlight was an existing avenue to showcase the people who make up the company. I had templates and photo selection guides created to make it really easy for employees to provide information. I decided to ask employees for photos instead of taking photos as done prior. It allowed for more personality and greatly reduced strain on the photographer’s schedule. To streamline the editing process, I had a template created and chose to use black and white photos instead of full color to minimize editing time.

Product Spotlight
Like the employee spotlight, the product spotlight showcased product in a fun way. To streamline this content, I had the products selected and worked on biannually. This reduced the amount of time spent, but increased its quality significantly because tone and style were all done at the same time.

Medical Fun Facts
One example of evergreen content that was easy to batch design were the medical fun facts. The copywriter wrote a years worth of facts and social copy at one time. The designers created and used background templates to output the medical fun facts quickly. Overall, these small decisions helped maintain consistent tone.

Summary

Teams work much better when they are all on the same page, and this project was no exception. Guidelines and rules can be draining on creativity based on their restrictive nature. The simplicity in execution and playfulness in tone for the guidelines made this project really fun (and helpful) without stifling creativity. My team and others in the department were able to use the resources I created to quickly make educated decisions that remained consistent with the brand. I was really grateful to see social media supporting my initiatives for the Typenex Medical brand.

After the completion of this project, the tasks of posting and managing the social media accounts were delegated elsewhere. I did continue to oversee the design elements and how they supported the new social media strategy. I was able to deliver a larger quantity of content in less time by streamlining processes. The content was created more consistently, which supported the brand awareness tactic of repetition really well. By streamlining evergreen content, it allowed for the team to design timely content without sacrificing other projects’ priority.

Overall, I felt the success of this project was creating fresh and unique personalities for each social media channel in an achievable way. By varying the approach and tone, the platforms felt more genuine and engaging, which made the user experience much better. By creating quality resources with each to follow guidelines supporting this shift, the creative team was able to accomplish more with less.