4 tips for Medical Device social media success

Do you want to introduce social media into your Medical Device marketing strategy but aren’t really sure where to start?

Or maybe you’re hoping to increase your success on social media but aren’t sure how?

Social media can be an excellent way to boost brand awareness, generate leads and build an online community. In fact, research has shown that 68% of marketers use social media to generate leads.

In this article, we’re going to share 4 tips for how to successfully use social media as part of your wider Medical Device marketing strategy.

Be Genuine

Sticking to several core topics or values with a clear and defined message is important. This consistency will help your brand develop an honest and authentic online reputation, which in turn will build trust with your audience.

Developing trust is crucial when it comes to making sales or generating leads, in fact, 80% of people said that trust was the deciding factor in their buying decisions.

The best way to do this is to consistently post about a selection of topics that your brand is committed to, for instance, the problems your audience is facing, updates in your field, and community-building.

Outright product promotion can appear too intense, whereas discussing subjects that your audience cares about shows that your company also cares.

Something you should stay clear of is posting inconsistently about a range of different and unrelated topics based on trends, or posting about awareness days that you don’t actively support. This could lead to mistrust amongst your audience as you’re not being authentic.

Instead of posting for the sake of posting, companies need to use their posts to build a picture of their brand in the minds of their audience. Like putting together the pieces of a puzzle to get the complete picture.

Listen to the data

Monitoring your data is one of the most important parts of social media marketing for Medical Device promotion. Without reporting on the performance of your posts, you really have no idea of how well you’re doing, and how you could be better.

Impressions and engagement rate

Two important metrics to look at are the number of impressions your posts are receiving and their engagement rates. Impressions refers to the number of people who have seen your posts whist engagement rate refers to interactions such a likes, comments and shares.

A high number of impressions means that your posts are being seen by a large audience, introducing more people to your brand, so it’s probably a metric you’ll want to examine closely if brand awareness is your main marketing goal.

Engagement rate is also an incredibly important metric, as it’s an indicator of the quality of your posts and how well your audience is receiving them. You can then optimise your posting based on this. For example, if you’re seeing that some posts are doing better than others, you can look for what those posts have in common and decide to do more of whatever that is.

Check out our article on engagement rate optimisation for a better understanding of its importance and how to optimise it.

Posting time

To ensure posts are successful, you need to upload when your audience is most active. Studies show that the first hour after you post is when you will receive 50% of your total engagement. Posting when your audience is online will naturally increase how much that 50% represents and therefore how much engagement you receive overall.

In practice this might mean that a post at 2 pm that gets 4 likes within the first hour will go on to get 8 likes. If a post at 11 am gets 8 likes within the first hour, it could go on to get 16 likes overall.

You can find out the best time to post for your particular audience by examining your analytics. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Hootsuite have analytic sections where you can browse all the data collected from your posts.

Conversion rate

If your goal is to use social media to generate more leads, then you need to look at the metrics as part of a larger campaign. The majority of your posts should be linking back to your website, which should be set up for conversion

You can see how well your posts are performing in terms of driving traffic to your site by looking at the click-through rate of each individual post. Alternatively, you can look at your acquisition data on Google Analytics to understand how well social is doing compared to your other channels.

You can also measure the conversion rate of your social traffic. Are they purchasing from you? Are they getting in contact with you?

If conversion rate isn’t great, you can look into why that might be, and consider if there is anything you can do to make conversion easier for your audience.

If you have more questions about how to use social media metrics to your advantage, why not check out our article on why social media reporting is important.

Building online communities

Building an online community is an excellent way to engage and build trust with your audience, but how do you do it?

One way is to develop a dialogue with your audience. You can post about the problems they’re likely to experience and open a forum for discussion. Your audience can discuss their own experiences, and your company can get involved in the conversation. Seeing that a company is trying to be genuinely helpful will pay off significantly.

Another way is to bring key opinion leaders or influencers into your brand. You may think that being in Medical Device, influencers may not be relevant, but that’s not the case. There are plenty of influencers on social media who focus on their own medical stories, sharing their experiences to help and support others.

Additionally, there are many doctors on social media who share health advice and help raise awareness about certain conditions. These types of people are the best accounts to reach out to as they can not only add a certain amount of personality and relatability to your brand, but you can also reach their audience.

Follow the rules and regulations

There are many benefits to Medical Device promotion on social media, but there are also limitations. Some images or videos may be too graphic for platform content guidelines, so be sure that you check the rules before posting any graphic content or put a trigger warning in the caption.

Failing to follow the rules and community guidelines of the platform you’re posting on can have significant consequences. Not only will your post be removed, but your whole account may be suspended, so it’s best to play it safe.

Furthermore, everything you post on social media is in the public domain, which means that it is subject to regulations. This means it’s important that you’re clued up on the EU MDR.

Generally, you’re not restricted by what you can say on social media, as long as it matches the claims in your intended purpose. You do need to check the regulations in your country though and discuss with your regulatory team.

Hopefully, this article has given you a good overview of Medical Device social media marketing, on what are the best tactics for medical device promotion. By keeping these ideas in mind, you’ll be able to help strengthen and develop your online presence.

Medical Device social media at Podymos

Do you want to communicate more effectively with HCPs and patients? Do you want to be able to deliver high-quality social media campaigns as part of your larger multichannel marketing strategy? You’ve come to the right place.

Podymos is a healthcare marketing agency, specialising in downstream Medical Device marketing.

We’re more expensive than non-specialised agencies and freelance teams because we only work in the Medical Device space so we have specialist knowledge and experience that other agencies may not be able to offer you.

If you want high-quality, compliant campaigns that help achieve your business goals, we’d love to hear from you. Simply leave us your contact details below and we’ll get back to you very soon for a no obligation chat.

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