Dietitians know that it’s one thing to share nutrition content on social platforms, yet quite a different challenge to get people to take notice and more importantly take an action, such as signing up to a newsletter, asking for nutrition advice or making a lifestyle change.
Below are five common mistakes that I see dietitians and nutritionists make on social media. If you can answer these questions with the right answer, you will start to build connections with real people and discover the true art of social sharing. And if your content really resonates with your audience, you may even succeed in creating a bridge from your social media platforms to your website or other business asset, where your audience will take an action of meaningful value to your business.
1) Do I really need to read that blog post essay?
Dietitians love our science and in today’s celebrity-endorsed diet world we need to rely on science more than ever to maintain our credibility. But just like the rest of the world we are time poor. If there is new research to be shared, try designing an infographic or tweet out key findings. But please don’t make me scroll through pages of text, no matter how great the data may be.
2) Are you selling teeth whitening solutions or nutrition?
Think of those ridiculous images of dietitians that appear in a Google search (I have yet to meet a dietitian with such pearly white teeth who actually wears one of those ridiculous lab coats!) and make sure that your brand images don’t appear the same way. Think of your brand image as a combination of your business values, services and your unique value-add to the world. Now ask yourself, do your social media images reflect that? With so many fantastic free image-editing tools available, there is really no excuse for using these visual clichés.
3) Do you want to get more followers or would you rather identify influencers?
What is faster – convincing 100 people to buy something or convincing one person who has 99 friends listening to their every word? This is the key to growing your audience and more importantly, gaining an engaged audience. So find your influencers who will talk about your content, and then create content that you know they’ll pay attention to.
4) #Do #you #really #need #so #many #hashtags?
Hashtags help make it easy for your target audience to find and join relevant conversations surrounding a specific keyword or phrase – very useful if you want to promote a unique campaign. But be aware of overdoing it. On Instagram it is recommended to stick with three to five hashtags and be cautious about piggybacking on trending hashtags, especially if you don’t want your audience to associate your brand with a negatively perceived hashtag.
5) Can you answer the “so what” factor?
This is by far the biggest mistake I see dietitians make. Too many jump onto the social media bandwagon and set up accounts all over the place (which take up a lot of time – the most valuable resource). This is usually done without a consolidated strategy in place to determine how social media is being used to achieve business objectives and more importantly, what metrics are in place to measure whether or not there is a positive return on investment.