Your Membership Marketing & Social Media

If you're like me, you've been getting invitations to numerous webinars about social media.  I've attended a few and have noticed significant angst to most of these presentations.  There seems to be almost a panic factor. "These groups will form with or without you - so you should be there (wherever 'there' is) NOW!" Don't panic.  If you know your membership, then you can establish your social presence and create a marketing plan to support it. 

Since I direct the marketing for healthcare groups, I'd like to share our recent social media experiences.  One group is a nursing organization.  We created a page for them on Facebook late in March and they currently have over 500 'fans'.  We make sure that the page had great content that would appeal to both member and non-members and we update our messages frequently.  Another group is primarily physicians, we created a Facebook page for them at the same time and they have 8 fans even though we created the same type of robust content for them. 

At the same time, we set both groups up on LinkedIn with similar content to the Facebook pages. With very little promotion to the membership, the physician group has three times the members of the nursing group.  We are pleased that we have attracted both members and non-members to all of our sites and will be tracking whether there will be a conversion factor.  However, we did have a non-member from the physician LinkedIn group register for our annual meeting. 

Conclusion - know your membership and you will know how to market to them.  Our physician group is more comfortable in the LinkedIn environment and our nursing group is more comfortable in the Facebook environment.  While we will keep all the sites updated, we know where we will have the more effective member reach and will use them accordingly. 

If you've had a similar or even different experience with your members and social media -- I'd love to hear about them!

Comments

[Irene Alvarez]

YES! I love your advice to disregard panic and do what makes sense for your membership. We like make a similar point when it comes to promoting meeting attendance - to put your efforts into the sites where your attendees are.

I thought I'd take a minute to share this with you:

http://experiencecolumbus.com/social-media-toolkit.cfm

This is a relatively new section of our site that we created to help demystify a few things about social media and how to potentially use it for meetings. Of course, we couldn't cover every point, and admittedly, some points are Columbus-specific. But in many respects, the information here can serve as a general resource. If you decide to take a look, please know that feedback is welcomed.

And thanks for sharing your experience above - it's always good to hear what's working for associations.

[Dick Barton]

I agree with Marilyn in that Facebook appeals to a different level of professional than LinkedIn. It has been my experience that Facebook is more for the fun-loving (playful) of any age but tends to be a bit younger than LinkedIn. LinkedIn is set up to be more for business and professionals looking to either get some notice for their expertise or experience or make new business-related connections.

[Marilyn Rutkowski]

Thanks for your comments Irene and Dick! I'll be adding another post over the weekend and hope you'll be back to share your insights.

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