Choosing a Social Media Channel

Transcript:

Hi there, bakers, writers, and rock stars. This week on the world we’re looking at choosing a social media channel. So, you already might be on social media and that’s cool, but you might decide that you want to join another channel or you might even decide that you want to separate out your personal from your professional.

So, the question is how do you make that decision? You can make it anywhere you like to be honest. You could have 2 accounts on 1 channel. So say, 2 Facebook accounts or 2 Instagram accounts. You could have 1 on different on several different channels that are all covering all aspects of your life. Where you can have your personal on 1 channel, and your professional on another channel. I don’t really mind how you divvy that up. But the question that I want to answer is how do you choose a channel based on what it is that you want to do with your people that follow you? So, obviously then that creates a question, who are my followers going to be or who would you like your followers to be? So, do you want to engage other researchers? Do you want to engage industry partners? Do you want to engage end users? If you know the answers to those questions then go on. So, if you know that you want to engage end users, so find out who they are, and where they hang out online.

I’ve found that patient groups hang out a lot on Facebook, and now there are a lot of discussion forums on Facebook. You might also find patient groups in discussion forums on Reddit. If you want to engage industry partners, LinkedIn has a lot of that, and there are people on LinkedIn who look for business to business collaboration or business to individual collaboration on LinkedIn. So, you might hang out there. If you want to engage other researchers, ResearchGate is probably pretty good for that. Similarly, Twitter is really good for other researchers and seeing the research experience. If you want to engage the general public, Instagram is good. And to be honest, TikTok is a rapidly growing social media channel with far more active users than LinkedIn or Twitter. And so, you might find that you should be on TikTok.

So, once you’ve worked out your target audience and where they hang out then you go and hang out in those channels. Now obviously, if you’re joining a Facebook group to do with a certain disease state, jumping in and trying to tell them how to run the world from their Facebook group is not a great way to engender your followers. So, you certainly need to work out what it is that you want to post, and how you’re going to post it. If you’re not comfortable in a discussion forum then maybe you shouldn’t join a discussion forum if you’re not going to contribute to the discussion. Although you might decide to join a discussion forum, so that you could perhaps, take away some of the issues that they have post about or the issues that they feel like they want addressed. Either way, those are some of the ways that you can choose your social media channel.