How to Engage People with Prediabetes & Diabetes on Facebook
Case Study: We reached 20,000 hours of diabetes education viewed on our page.
Do you remember what life was like before the internet?
Although the internet was started before I was born, I was around when it became mainstream. Entering the homes of the lower-middle class.
Do you remember those first dial-up days? My parents would go to make a call but would be struck down by the loud…echoing…alien sound waves that would take up the phone line.
The #1 reason my classmates started using the internet was to chat with each other after school.
At the time, AOL Instant Messenger, the little yellow man, dominated our lives. We couldn’t wait to log on after school to see which of our friends/crushes would be logged on at the same time and available to chat.
AOL paved the way for the social platforms that would connect us moving forward.
Were you around when Xanga was a thing?
Did you have a thriving MySpace page?
I remember people getting crap for joining Facebook while still in high school. It was clearly a college-only thing.
Today, Facebook is an everybody thing. Everybody above the age of 25.
In fact, Facebook has over 2 billion monthly users including 45% of people over 70 and 70% of people over 50.
That’s a lot of people.
That’s why we started with Facbeook.
As a quick background, my company has launched two diabetes education mobile apps and produced thousands of diabetes education videos. We’ve worked with multiple diabetes prevention and management programs in many different ways.
Through this experience, we discovered a key problem…
EVERYONE was struggling with increasing enrollment in their programs.
It didn’t matter how fancy our apps or content were if the people with diabetes never used them.
Phone calls, mail, and email were no longer working. We needed a new way to reach the person directly and engage them in our offers.
It was with this insight that we launched DiabetesCare and DiabetesCare Espanol…the rest is engagement history.
Over the last 24 months, we have been using a combination of social media expertise, content expertise, and subject matter (diabetes) expertise to reach people with diabetes and engage them in new ways.
As you can see from the 1,400,000 minutes of diabetes education viewed, it is working well!
By why is it working?
At the core of everything we do on social media are value and trust.
If you want the person you target to take action with you, they must trust you. For them to trust you, you must bring them value.
How much value depends on the person you target. Some people are ready to get married after one date, but most will need to date you for a while first.
So how do you start the dating process? How do you begin to bring value, so your target audience will trust you?
We like to break it down into five key steps.
1. See your audience.
2. Speak the language.
3. Focus on quantity over quality.
4. Leverage your skills.
5. Show up.
Number One: See Your Audience
Seeing your audience is about spending the time studying your audience on your “go-to-market” social account, so you can learn their problems and how they talk about those problems. Study the pages they follow, their comments on products and services, the groups they join, and how they talk about each of those things.
Spending this time in research will teach you how to communicate or speak the language of your target audience on a specific platform. It will teach you the problems you need to solve for your target audience. It will teach you what type of content you can make to reach them regularly.
Number Two: Speak The Language
You not only need to know how your audience speaks on a specific social platform, but you must also know how the platform communicates with its audience.
For example, there are 13 billion videos viewed on Facebook every day. That tells me that the platform language is video. From there I can dive deeper and discover what kind of video, how often, at what times, on what days, in what ways…and so on.
Number Three: Focus on Quantity or Quality
If anyone tells you that you need Hollywood-Grade content, run away from them. There is a man named Gary Vee who is the founder of the Ad agency that serves customers like Pepsi…and he records selfies on his cell phone and posts them to his millions of followers daily.
The reason I say this is because he is the smartest/best marketer in the world and he uses cell phone videos…so you can too.
And you NEED to. The key to gaining traction on social media is finding what works. You can only find what works by doing a lot of tests. In the content world, you can only do a lot of tests if you keep it low cost and simple. So get simple, forget about top quality and put some stuff out quickly.
Number Four: Leverage Your Skills
The best way to get content out quickly and consistently is to leverage your skills. What is your natural inclination? What were you good at as a child? Or what is your creative outlet today?
Start there! Leverage that innate skill. This will allow you to take the content production into your own hands! By leveraging your skills, you can make content quickly and affordably. It will only cost you your time and effort.
Number Five: Show Up
The last and final key is simple…show up.
Don’t post once then go ghost for two weeks. Don’t start strong for a month then go missing for a year.
Show up consistently, persistently, and generously.
How We Turned My Dad Into a Diabetes Influencer
So to bring it full circle I want to break down how our Real People with Diabetes Vlog follows each of these key principles.
- See Your Audience: We spent weeks combing Facebook and discovered people were helping each other in the comments. So we decided to focus our content on helping people help each other.
- Speak the Language: We started with video and discovered the types of videos our target audience enjoyed the most. We doubled down on language by featuring real people from our target audience aka my dad.
- Quantity > Quality: We started with laptop camera videos and graduated to iPhone cameras. We are putting out regular content using a process that captures the authenticity of our diabetes influencers.
- Leverage Your Skills: We had produced over 100 entrepreneurial vlogs to document the KingFit journey. So it made perfect sense to start with a diabetes vlog featuring my dad.
- Show Up: Tune in EVERY MONDAY for The Real People with Diabetes Vlog by DiabetesCare!
Thank you for reading.
If you found this information valuable and are ready to take action, feel free to book a free social media strategy session with me!
→ Click here to book a session.
With care,
Miguel
