Dear Pharma companies: Stop talking about yourselves!
When you have over 99,000 followers on Facebook, could you be doing anything wrong?
Unfortunately, the answer is yes! Even big brands can sometimes (ok, often) do things better.
This week, I happened to visit the Facebook profiles of three big Pharma brands: GSK, Pfizer and Novartis.
While much of the content was genuinely interesting, one thing hit me straight away. On all of the pages, the brands’ names kept on coming up again and again.
GSK was the worst offender. Of 7 posts so far this month, 5 explicitly referred to GSK, its products, history or its research. For example, they directed people to a website on colds and coughs, which they are supporting “through our Beechams and Night Nurse brands”; under an illustration of a floating laboratory set up by their heritage company in 1907 to research neglected tropical diseases, they added, “We continue to carry out research into NTD.”
Has LinkedIn changed its SWAM policy…And not told anyone?
One of LinkedIn’s most hated policies is SWAM – site-wide auto moderation. This means that if you post on a group, and the moderator decides to ban you for any reason, all your posts to all groups you belong to must be reviewed by a moderator before they appear.
The result has been that many users – the exact number is unclear, but LinkedIn itself estimates 100-200,000 – have been unable to post to LinkedIn groups, often for unfair or unclear reasons, and have lost valuable business opportunities. Many others have been extremely cautious about how they use the groups because they do not want to be upset the moderators and be SWAMmed (yes, it’s now a verb).
Recently, Forbes ran a piece describing the level of aggravation amongst users and claiming that many SWAM victims are defecting elsewhere.
But did LinkedIn actually respond to the criticism, but forget to tell anyone?
Why LinkedIn’s new blog scheme will never take off
Yesterday, LinkedIn made a shock announcement: It is going to open its blogging platform to anyone who wants to share advice and insight – and not just to people it deems ‘influencers’. The aim is to try and reverse two quarters of drops in page views, and get users to be more engaged, and stay longer on the site.
How to generate new leads on LinkedIn
Let’s talk about how to generate leads on LinkedIn. Did you know that LinkedIn has the highest visitor to lead conversion ratio of all social media platforms. Something like 3% of visitors on LinkedIn converts to leads. Now are you using LinkedIn properly to create leads? It’s a great place for new business generation….
10 ways to get pharma companies on board with social media
“We’re not doing social media. It’s just too risky…. It’s a waste of money… We’re doing fine without it.”
And with that one sentence, your plan to bring your company’s marketing into the 21st century is scuppered.
Gaining internal buy-in for a social media programme is still one of the greatest digital obstacles many companies face. In the pharmaceutical industry, it can be particularly difficult. The sector has been very slow to adopt social media, for a variety of reasons, and according to a recent survey by PMLiVE, 17.2% of people working in or for the sector still think that management approval is the biggest challenge of all.
So if you’re a comms or marketing director who understands how crucial social media has become in every sector; or if you are a visionary CEO or vice-president who is eager to reach out to stakeholders – how do you overcome the scepticism of your colleagues and (possibly) bosses?
How much time does social media really take? The brutal truth
“We don’t have time for social networking / blogging / Tweeting / Facebook”.
It’s the mantra of many companies that have yet to use social media for marketing, and probably the occasional lament of companies that do.
The reply from social media marketers often goes something like this: Social media does not require a massive investment of time; you can get going in as little as 15-20 minutes a day; and that quarter-of-an-hour will pay off.
Well, this isn’t one of those posts.
Like any other venture that is actually worthwhile, social media takes time to do well. A lot of time.
There are things you can do in 15-20 minutes a day: you can establish a presence. And that is certainly better than nothing – and better than many other companies are doing.
Think you know your audience? Prove it!
The key to social media success, we are told again and again, is to “Know your audience”. And like many clichés, it’s true.
Understanding who you are targeting allows you to create exactly the kind of content that appeals to your potential clients, building up a relationship between you, so that when they are ready to buy – you are their obvious option.
Surface knowledge about demographics is nowhere near enough. To effectively appeal to them, you really need to understand their priorities, needs, worries.
Again and again, though, we have found that businesses assume they intuitively understand their potential clients – and then, when they sit in on focus groups, or read the market research, are shocked to discover that many of their basic assumptions were wrong. They may have been out-of-date, based on guesswork, or perhaps they just knew less about them than they thought.
Why your competitors might be your closest ally on social media
Michael Stelzner is one of the biggest success stories online. Five years ago, he launched Socialmediaexaminer.com, a site dedicated to helping social media marketers promote their businesses on social media. Within two weeks it was ranked by Technorati as one of the top 10 business blogs, and it is now one of the world’s largest social media magazines.
In his book Launch, he explains exactly how he did it – and how other businesses, in all sectors, can copy his model.
His formula for success is this: Great Content + Other People – Marketing Messages = Growth.
The secret is to constantly produce material online that is genuinely helpful to your potential customers, while significantly toning down your marketing messages, so that they feel that you have their best interests in mind – and are not just pushing your product at them.
How to convert your Twitter followers into customers
Let us talk about how to convert your Twitter followers into customers. It’s all very well having hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter but what are you doing with those followers? Are they actually generating business for you? I think sometimes on social media you actually need to be a little bit mercenary; you…
