Is it time to give Twitter a fresh look?

Here is why Twitter should become a relevant part of your social media marketing strategy.

Updated January 2022

If you have been using Twitter as part of your healthcare marketing social media strategy but have only been tweeting about the latest news sporadically, you are missing out. The platform has been rated the 5th in traffic worldwide as of October 2021. What was a straightforward social media channel to share ideas now allows you to speak to other healthcare professionals (HCPs) in real-time.

Twitter’s average Monetizable Daily Active Usage reached 211 million in Q3 2021, which is an increase of 13% year over year. Considering that 88 percent of physicians use social media to research pharmaceutical, biotech, and medical devices, Twitter represents a great opportunity to connect.

Establishing relationships and sharing information with healthcare professionals is already a challenge due to their limited free time and the competitive environment they operate in. Using Twitter effectively, however, allows you to grab their attention, make connections, and educate them in a more relaxed setting. Acknowledging that the lifespan of a tweet averages 15 minutes, it is imperative that your message is relevant and impactful so it can stand out amongst the crowd.

Here are 6 marketing techniques every healthcare marketer should implement in their Twitter social media strategy.

1. Audit your Twitter account

Ask yourself, “When was the last time I performed an audit on our Twitter account? Where do I begin?

• Start by reviewing your bio to ensure it is current and optimize it to reflect who you are as a company.
• You may want to add a mission statement or something your company offers.
• Ensure your profile photo is a brand logo that continues to convey your brand message.
• Emphasize the organizational goals you want your followers to know about.
• Gather your tweets. You can do this by exporting your tweets in Twitter analytics. Log into your dashboard, select the tweets tab, set your data range, and export the data.
• Review activity by organizing data into categories that have potential high reach impacts such as retweets, likes, responses, etc. Take note of which tweets worked best (i.e. videos, copy, hashtags, mentions).
• Identify old tweets to delete. If you had any changes in your product offerings, goals of the organizations, or shifts in your brand’s focus, those old tweets should be eliminated.
• Finally, make sure the overall strategy or guidelines for posting in the future or the timings of posts are updated. This is a way to get the team refocused to ensure they are all on the same page for creating and sharing content.

2. Engage in reputation management

Monitor what users are saying about your organization, pharma products, medical devices, and hospital services on Twitter, and respond when appropriate. If users are sharing misinformation, you can politely correct them in real-time to protect your brand. Reacting to people on social media shows that you are an organization that cares about your reputation and is tuned into what consumers are saying. An effective strategy, for example, would be to correct a statement about a false merger on social media — which happens often in the pharma industry and can affect stock prices — in addition to issuing a press release.

3. Become the expert

Using Twitter can show HCPs that you are a credible source of information and a thought leader in the industry. By posting valuable content, you can expand awareness of your brand and create an extensive list of followers who are interested in what you have to say. Share high-quality articles from reputable sources, retweet experts in your field, and share original content by linking to your own blog posts, white papers, and medical journal articles. Readers will trust you and share your content, which will further expand your reach. You will also be top of mind to HCPs when others inquire about an issue that your product or service can contribute to.

4. Use hashtags wisely

The rule to follow is to not use more than two hashtags for each tweet since performance drops. Carefully choose a hashtag or two for each tweet that is relevant to your brand and the content you are tweeting about. Make them easy to remember and spell. Do your research and make sure that no one else is using it while optimizing the current ones already in use to refer to your brand. Don’t expect too much if people aren’t incentivized to use these. Generate interest and provide a good reason to do so and that is mutually beneficial. Finally, identify possible influencers to create a higher visibility to your brand.

5. Initiate a poll

A clever way to create engagement is to conduct a poll to initiate new conversations that are relevant for HCPs centered around your brand. Results can also provide valuable data that can enhance your marketing and sales strategies. Polls can provide the blueprint for new ideas or concepts to include in your content by asking your followers questions of what is important to them.

Polls can also establish you as a thought leader or influencer when you include trending topics relevant to your industry. Ultimately the goal is to promote your business and utilizing a poll that includes your followers in these decisions will create both more brand awareness and loyalty. Finally, always create an end date that will be relevant to the topic at hand that will end anywhere between 5 minutes after being posted up to 7 days.

6. Advertise

To quickly increase engagement and followers, consider promoted tweets or Twitter ads. Your account will easily be discovered by thousands of people who may not have been aware you were on the platform. Twitter offers some unique ad targeting features that you won’t find in Google, Facebook, or Bing.

• Pay for Performance – You only pay when you reach your predetermined goal whether it be conversions, number of app installs, or increase in followers. Twitter serves as your partner because it assumes some of the risk which is incentive enough to utilize this option.
• Reasonable Cost Per Click – These are pennies on the dollar literally. It is all based on an action driven by competition and what they are willing to pay.
• Targeting Keywords – This offers a precise way to target specific people that have shown intent either from words or hashtags they have used (not possible on Facebook). You can be precise on Twitter and use popular hashtags such as #ppcchat for marketers to tweet all things PPC (pay per click). This is a powerful, efficient tool that allows targeting of only people interested and engaged on the topic rather than including a wide audience.

Twitter is an optimal channel to increase your brands awareness but by acknowledging that things move much quicker requires a solid marketing strategy to grab the attention of healthcare professionals.

Does your company have a Twitter account? If not, register with your business's name and fill out your profile with an informative bio and image. As consumers continue to seek relevant, real-time information in a quick and digestible format, Twitter will continue to grow — and you'll want to be a part of that community.