logo

Tag : Life science social media marketing

Change to LinkedIn Groups

Carlton Hoyt 12:48 pm , April 9, 2013

Using LinkedIn groups for Social Media Marketing in the Life SciencesAs just about anyone who uses Hubspot already knows, back in November Hubspot added some functionality to the Hubspot Social Media Tool which allowed Hubspot users the ability to post directly to LinkedIn Groups en masse. While group spam on LinkedIn has been a small problem for some time now, this action by a marketing automation platform as well-used as Hubspot sent up some red flags at LinkedIn. Earlier this year, LinkedIn issued its response:

“Now whenever someone is blocked and deleted in one group, they are put on Requires Moderation in all of their existing groups so that their contributions will be routed to the Submissions Queue for review before displaying in their groups. Any group manager can of course flip such a person back to Free to Post within her own specific group if desired.”

This change is highly relevant to all life science marketers using LinkedIn for social media marketing. Those who adopt the ethos of quantity over quality and go for the most reach while paying scant attention to the relevance and value of their group contributions may soon find themselves not being able to post to many of their groups, especially since many LinkedIn groups are either sparsely moderated or not moderated at all. LinkedIn has suddenly made it very important not to be viewed as spam.

Luckily, all that is necessary to avoid the unfortunate occurrence of requiring moderation across all LinkedIn groups is to do exactly what those utilizing content marketing should be doing anyway: ensure that your content is relevant and valuable to the group membership. Don’t try to overextend your reach into groups where your content isn’t relevant, don’t overuse promotions and follow the group rules.

"Looking to increase the effectiveness of your life science company’s social media efforts? Talk to BioBM. We’ll help you devise a strategy that leverages content and creates value for your target audiences in ways that help build brand value and grow your presence in the marketplace. Contact us today."
Blog / Social Media 12:48 pm , April 9, 2013

Get a Google+ Community

Carlton Hoyt 1:49 pm , January 17, 2013

Google Plus communities for life science marketingWe get a lot of people asking us how they can better use LinkedIn for marketing or business development. It seems an almost universally accepted fact that LinkedIn, and in particular LinkedIn groups, can be a powerful marketing tool. We agree – that’s why we started the Marketing of Life Science Tools & Services group. Now, however, LinkedIn groups are a mature feature, well-used by scientists and suppliers / service providers. There are usually multiple groups for any given area of interest, and “copycat” groups frequently don’t catch on. You can create a more niche group, but that may be of interest to only a fraction of your audience and you may have problems growing it to a critical mass. Quite frankly, the best time to have started a LinkedIn group was probably 2007 – right before the early adopters started using them. At that point, you could have been the founder of the “Molecular and Cell Biology” group (currently 6,725 members), the “Genomics: Next Generation DNA Sequencing (NGS) and Microarray” group (15,554 members) or the “Structural Biology” group (3,817 members). Wouldn’t that have been nice?

Well with every new platform comes new opportunities, and last month Google launched their equivalent to LinkedIn Groups: Google+ Communities. It’s very early in its life-cycle, so most of the popular terms are still available as community names. It’s way too soon to know if Google+ Communities will ever reach the level of adoption that LinkedIn Groups have, but it’s not much of a risk to snap up a name and occasionally seed it with some content. You might be glad you did later.

"BioBM Consulting has helped many life science companies formulate and implement social media strategies that are practical, realistic, and create value for the organization. If you would like to leverage our experience, contact us. We’d be happy to speak with you."
Blog / Social Media 1:49 pm , January 17, 2013

Google+ for SMM: too early?

Carlton Hoyt 12:18 pm , July 27, 2011

UPDATE (1/24/12): Google has made changes to its search algorithms that have caused us to change our position on Google+. For more recent information, please see our newer post: Google Wants You to Plus.

YES, it is too early to effectively use Google+ for social media marketing. Put very simply, Google+ is too young of a technology and hasn’t developed any tools that would make it genuinely useful for companies. If you want to use it for personal networking purposes or just to get a feel for it, then sure, create a Google+ account but your Google+ account has to reflect YOU (literally – Google doesn’t allow corporate accounts yet). There is also a very high likelihood that you’ll have to attempt to recreate all of your connections if something akin to a facebook “page” is developed for non-personal uses.

When Google+ begins to allow corporate accounts and / or develops other tools that allow companies to leverage it effectively, that’s the time you want to jump in. Until then, it simply won’t provide anywhere near a desirable ROI and there are no benefits to attempting to be an extreme early adopter (or “innovator”, as the technology adoption lifecycle would call them).

"Want to know how your life science company can achieve a high and measurable ROI with social media marketing? Talk to us and we’ll help you build a strategy and solution to do just that."
Blog / Social Media 12:18 pm , July 27, 2011