10 Essential Social Media Tips for Life Sciences B2B Marketers

If you have any interest in applying social media to your company (or yourself), you must read Mashable.com, an essential resource for social media marketing. Mashabable ran a feature titled, 10 Essential Social Media Tips for B2B Marketers. I thought it was worthwhile to revisit them and make some comments. I’ve  rearranged the tips in what I consider their order of importance to life sciences and biotechnology companies.

1. Monitor Your Industry. Author Christina Warren suggests using Google Alerts, Social Mention, YackTrack or BackType to monitor mentions of your business on social sites. I put this first, because you need to have an understanding of what your audience is saying about you, the industry before you start any conversations.

2. Find and Follow Industry Influencers. Whether you’re on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, you’ll want to identify leaders and influencers in the industry. I recommend doing this before any of the steps that follow.

3. Start a Blog. While this is a no-brainer outside the life sciences and in pharma, there is still a lot of hesitance, especially in companies that have FDA-regulated products. It does take time and requires writing skills. A few week’s back, I blogged about Mary Canady’s article on social media in the life sciences. In that article, she mentioned MO-BIO Laboratories, a small company that runs a blog perfectly targeted toward its audience. Definitely worth taking a look at. Since most people won’t take the time to write a full-fledged blog, at least start micro-blogging on Twitter.

4. Use Twitter Effectively. Mashable’s suggestion is to start Twitter by ’searching phrases relevant to your business and monitoring those searches regularly…’, which is 1 above. Once you understand what people are saying, then join the conversation.

5. Take Advantage of LinkedIn. I am a huge LinkedIn user (16K network) and have easily sold several consulting engagements using that network. One way to build business leads and get well known is to use LinkedIn Groups and to participate.

6. Figure Out Your ‘Social Voice.’ One thing that marketers say social media can do for pharmaceutical (and any other large) corporations is put the ‘human’ back in business. Warren reminds you that your social voice is informal and responds to customers and inquiries. Your brand voice is more anonymous. I suspect that in the not too distant future, the social voice will become brand voice.

7. Be Consistent and Don’t be Afraid to Followup. Consistency means blogging or tweeting regularly. For some that will mean once per day, for others, once per week. Following up means you don’t leave anyone hanging. You respond and acknowledge.

8. Leverage Analytics for Business Metric Measurement. This means paying attention to your traffic numbers, understanding where traffic is coming from, what traffic is responding to and changing your habits accordingly.

There were two tips that I didn’t think applied to most life sciences and biotechnology companies – 9. Use Social Media for Giveaways and Promos and 10. Don’t be Creepy. The latter goes without saying; the former might make sense for companie that produce a lot of product and use samples as part of their marketing.

So there you have it, 10 tips you can leverage today for your social media marketing program. If you have any questions, drop me a line.