Written by:
Ian Purcell is Senior Marketing Manager and Digital Marketing Team Lead at Samba Scientific. He has a wealth of experience in powerful brand management, advertising, and marketing campaigns for various industries, including but not limited to medical retail. You can find out more on LinkedIn.
Quick Tips
- Identify the audience’s barrier to buying or pain points
- Use identified pain points to quickly grab attention
- Keep content short and easily digestible
- Provide a clear call-to-action
- Know the creative constraints specific to the social platforms
Understand your audience’s barrier to buying or pain points
Engaging social content will motivate your audience to shift their behavior from thinking they want to buy to actually buying. The goal of social content is not to manipulate or trick the audience into buying but to provide an easy or convenient opportunity for those who are ready to buy.
To do so, identify the features that differentiate your company’s products or services from competitors. Additionally, showcase a solution to an issue that other companies do not provide. In biotech, the solution is typically an advancement in technology. This advancement should improve the quality of research data or results. An example can be a solution that uses artificial intelligence to get more information out of your Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) data. Another solution can be focused on providing exceptional customer service or providing greater flexibility or scalability.
Once you have a better idea of the vital information that buyers are looking for, you are ready to start crafting your social content.
Know the best practices for creating social content
Quickly grab your audience’s attention
The first few words of your written social content must catch your intended audience’s interest. This initial contact with your audience will dictate whether they will stick around. The goal is get the audience wanting to learn more or scroll on to the next post on their feed. Here’s an example:
Background information
“Company A” provides flexible COVID-19 testing solutions, including testing kits, portable qPCR machines, and consumables. Company A identifies their audience to be small or non-traditional laboratories that are hesitant in starting or resuming COVID-19 testing out of frustration with the ongoing supply chain instability.
Identify the audience’s barrier to buying
Acknowledging the frustration and anxiety that these small labs are experiencing, Company A will promise reliability and flexibility.
Resulting social content
Reliable supply chain access for all COVID-19 testing needs. Discover our customizable testing solutions for small labs.
Maintain your audience’s attention with a quick and steady pace
Keep your audience engaged by providing both concise and precise information. As scientists, we are accustomed to fitting as much detail as possible into one sentence. However, we must break from that habit when writing social content. Long, run-on sentences will quickly disengage our audience. For example:
Long and hard to digest content
In our webinar, you will learn how machine learning in next-generation sequencing is utilized to provide more insight into patient responses to cancer therapy as well as understanding the cancer state.
Break down into smaller sentences
Get more out of your NGS data with machine learning. Learn how to predict patient responses to cancer therapy. Register for the webinar to learn more.
Provide a clear call to action (CTA)
Providing an informative CTA encourages your audience to engage with your content further. CTAs can bring in more leads by directing them to your website or encouraging them to sign up for a webinar or clinical trial.
Ways CTAs are used
- Lead Generation: gather potential customers by directing them to a form on your website’s landing page
- Read/Learn/Discover More: entice your audience to click on the link provided to learn more about the product or service you are posting about
- Event Promotion: raise awareness of the event and encourage your audience to register or buy tickets
- Building your network: Follow Us or Connect with Us
Understand the specific constraints for the different social platforms
Social platforms have their own unique features that continuously evolve. Understanding these features can help inform the type of engaging social content that you will make. Before we briefly dive into each social platform, there are some overlapping features to make a note of. Across all platforms mentioned below, social posts can be accompanied by photos or videos. Videos are defaulted to mute. Here, you want to think about what is best incorporated into the text versus the imagery. For a video that starts muted, you should consider how the first 3 seconds of the video can support your written caption.
How to capture attention on video:
- Talking directly to the camera—providing a break in the fourth wall
- Short text superimposed onto the video
- Closed captioning
- Incorporating contrasting colors or interesting motion
Businesses and professionals widely use Twitter. Unlike other social platforms, Twitter restricts social copies to only 280 characters, but the best performing Tweets are less than 140 characters long! Twitter posts, or “tweets”, can be accompanied by a photo or short video (< 140 seconds).
LinkedIn provides a professional social platform that is mainly used for job searches and B2B commerce. For posts and ads, you would want less than 25 words for your main content before it gets trimmed. If your messaging is longer than 25 words you should follow the visible limit with a line break. Coupled with this with video you can run a two-pronged approach for B2B campaigns. Even though, the maximum video length is 10 minutes, we find keeping the clip short (< 120 minutes) is preferred when accompanying written social content.
At first, Instagram was solely a picture-sharing app. For instance, you would post a picture with a caption that is featured on your followers’ feeds. TikTok saw incredible success during the pandemic. As a result many social media platforms are focusing on featuring video content. The current trend is the utilization of short-form videos. As a result, Instagram added the Reels feature. This feature purposely pushes content to a broader audience. Now that Instagram is pushing for video content, it makes sense for content to be formatted as a video.
Facebook has become less popular in recent years. Keeping your content short and specific is desired. Like other social platforms. The strongest social copy ranges between 40-80 characters.
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