Social Media Content Strategy for Your Senior Services Site

Senior services sites that use social media as a marketing tool have an edge over those that don't. In this day and age, people often rely on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram for their news and information. In fact, the majority of seniors now use social media over traditional media, such as TV or newspapers. For seniors, social media isn’t just a hobby or something they do when they have time to kill. It's an important form of communication and staying connected to the people and issues that matter to them. They use it for everything from staying in touch with friends and family to finding information on health care and senior services in their area. Having a strategy in place is key for any senior services site that wants to stay relevant and continue to engage its audience.

Reasons You Need a Social Media Content Strategy

To gain the most traction on social media and with content marketing in general, you need to have a strategy. It isn’t enough to post randomly whenever you remember to create content. All content should be a part of a greater plan. With this unified plan, you can foster more engaging posts that readers remember. Some of the reasons that you need a social media content strategy for your senior service site include:

Increase SEO Engagement

SEO is an important buzzword within the digital marketing community for a reason: good SEO increases the likelihood that your market will find you when they need a site like yours. For instance, if you operate a website that refers seniors to different assisted living communities, you want your site to show up when users enter search terms related to assisted living communities in your area. Without SEO best practices, it is unlikely that your site will show up in the first page of results compared to the other sites that utilized SEO techniques.

Be a Resource for Seniors and Their Families

For many senior services sites, it is a primary mission to serve as a resource for seniors and their families. By creating more of a social media content strategy versus posting ad hoc, you will have the opportunity to post more helpful content that they can use and benefit from. If you post every Wednesday and Friday, for instance, they will know to look for new content on these dates.

Foster Consistency and Google Relevance

Regular, consistent, and frequent posting is important for Google search engine algorithms. It is likely part of social media algorithms, too. It is better to post less frequently if that means that you’ll be more consistent than to post 10 posts on the first of the month. Consistency matters a lot in your social media and content marketing efforts.

Whatever blog posts your site puts out should be cross-posted on your social media platforms. This will keep your social media pages active and encourage additional views on your blog posts. The more that you do this, the more frequently you send new readers to your site. It’s a win-win scenario for all of your online presence.

See Better Returns on Digital Campaigns

No one wants to spend money on a social media campaign that won’t garner high ROI. You want to make the most of your investments, which is why it is so important to have a strategy behind your decision making. Your social media strategy should include:

What keywords to use
What very specific audience to create social media ads for
Your goals and how you plan to measure them

By following and modifying this strategy, you should expect to see better returns on digital campaigns. For instance, if you never customize your social media ads to reach only your target audience, you’ll pay for people to see it who have little interest in what your site offers. For senior services sites, you’ll want to target seniors and their children. The narrower you make your target, the higher percentage of conversions you’ll see.

How to Create a Social Media Content Strategy

Creating a social media content strategy for your senior services site doesn’t need to be complicated. Start by evaluating your competitors to see how often they post on their site’s blog and social media. Sign up for their email subscription lists to learn more about their content marketing strategy.

Once you see how other companies accomplish this, it’s time to decide what it is that you want to do. You can create similar campaigns to the ones that you like, improve upon the ideas presented in the campaigns you don’t like, and address the gaps. While you should never directly copy and paste the content you find, it is entirely within your rights to use the ideas, concepts, and inspirations within your own campaigns.

Then, you simply need to schedule out your ideas. If you will create the content on your own, you will need to write the content and find pictures. If you plan to work with professional writers to help you, it is important to give them enough time. You will need to upload your requirements and have time to review their work before scheduling it.

How to Create the Right Content for Your Site

Researching competitors is just one way to identify content that you can put on your site or on social media. However, most senior services sites do well by focusing on the needs and interests of their target audience. Really take a deep dive into your audience and their needs.

For instance, some senior services sites are really aimed at the children and spouses of aging parents, not the seniors themselves. If this is your audience, the content needs would be different than if you wanted to target older people. You may want to include more content on the importance of family loyalty and doing the best for mom and dad. If you target seniors directly, this language wouldn’t be as appropriate.

Understand Different Types of Content

There are many different types of content that you can use. Virtually any content that you post directly on your site, whether as a blog post or press release, you can also share on social media. This is a good thing to do, as the links lead your social media audience directly to your site and not a third-party one.

In addition to sharing content on your site, you can share content from other sites. Finding relevant news articles to your mission and your audience is one way that you can provide information to your audience that they want to know with very little effort on your part.

You can also share pictures, memes, and quotes, as long as they fit within your brand voice. You never want to post something that doesn’t align with the tone and style of your site. After all, your social media posts are a reflection of your brand. There have been many social media scandals from companies that posted something that was off for their audience.

How Often Should You Post on Social Media?

It is somewhat difficult to give a firm definition of how often you should post on social media. There are a number of factors that influence how often you should post. The answer is not the same for every site.

First, it is always better to be consistent with posting. If you can post twice a week consistently, it is better to post twice than to post once a week and then take weeks off in between. Your followers may unfollow your page if they think you’ve stopped posting.

Second, posting every day is great. If you start posting more than a couple of times a day, it could become annoying to followers. This could cause some of them to unfollow or unlike your page. When you ramp up posting frequency, be mindful about how it impacts your follower count and engagement. If things look good, keep going. If followers start to unfollow your account, it’s okay to re-assess frequency and go from there.

Third, the time of your posts might make a difference when it comes to your social media engagement. Certain demographics are more likely to engage with posts at certain times. For example, working professionals might check their social media feeds at lunch or on the weekends more than during working hours.

How to Measure Successes on Social Media

As with anything, measuring your progress is vital to knowing what works and doesn’t work on social media. You can learn from eBooks and marketing courses what strategies to try. You can find out from your competitors what they do. However, you will only know what works for your brand and your audience by monitoring your own successes.

You can start simply by looking at the metrics each social media site provides. This data is readily available and free. You can see which posts had the highest levels of engagement through comments and shares. You can see what types of content performs the worst. Plan to continue or amp up the most successful strategies and discontinue or improve the least successful ones.

Google Analytics is also a powerful tool for measuring social media’s impact on your senior services site. Once you install the code on your site, you gain access to very valuable insights into how traffic works on your site. You can see the sources of traffic. Look to see if the number of visits and page views increase over time as you implement your social media strategies. You can also see which social media platforms increase traffic.

Tips for Crafting a Successful Social Media Strategy

You will need to target your audience, recognize opportunities for content promotion, build a relationship with your audience, and provide useful information. Experiment with content and tools to see how each performs. Due to its low cost, there are many different inexpensive strategies worth trying and seeing once. Here are some other tips worth considering as you build out your social media strategy:

Building a Large Following Takes Time

Conversely, remember that a single post on social media will not build your following to be several thousand followers. Consistency is key, as is patience. No growth might signal that something isn’t working but slow growth might be par for the course. It’s easier to gain new followers the more followers that you have.

Start on Facebook

Facebook is the easiest to use site out of the four main social media sites, but it's still important to have strategies in place. The best opportunities take advantage of your community members' interest in senior services by developing relationships with them through events, product giveaways, special pages or groups, and so on. You can also promote awareness for upcoming events or resources in your area.

Create a Pinterest Board About Your Senior Services

Pinterest is an excellent platform because it allows you to create boards that are devoted to a specific topic or area, such as senior services. Boards have the potential to have an audience of tens of thousands of people at any given time, so you'll want to create engaging content for them.

Social media has become a very important tool for content marketing. Each platform has its own use and benefits, but it's also beneficial to develop your own custom strategy that's tailored to your needs. Senior services can benefit greatly from using social media as a marketing tool, because it allows you to reach out to the masses with little cost.

Just remember to be authentic, post quality content, and connect with your audience. When you do this, you'll find that the social media platforms will work all on their own for you. If you need help to create top notch social media content, browse our selection of top writers who can help.

Published by Jubilee Heutmaker on Monday, January 10, 2022 in Social Media Marketing, Senior Services, Social Media Marketing.