5 things we learned from engaging a million people globally in less than 5 months.

Our team at Greater Than One (GTO) recently launched a global, multi-channel campaign designed to raise public awareness of a well-known health condition. Within 5 months of launch, the pharma partnered campaign has had more than 641 million combined online exposures and 5.7 million engagements via digital channels.

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This is uncharted territory for pharma. GTO and our partners collaborated to create the strategy and execute innovative tactics as well. Below are 5 actionable insights that, based on our experiences, are key to reaching the first million engagements on social media, and that we recommend for all social campaigns:

• Build Your Audience Early: Use paid page promotion strategies that target your ideal audience to help build your initial channel following. Getting to your first 5,000 followers is often more difficult than other stages of channel growth.
• Make Content ‘Snackable’: Content that can be easily consumed by followers should be prioritized in order to maximize social engagement. Videos that are shorter than 30 seconds have a much higher completion rate and more engagement than their longer counterparts.
• Leverage Video and Other Rich Media: Image and video posts represented 9 of 10 of the most engaged social posts for the campaign. Rich media is often prioritized by social algorithms, which are essential to expanding your content’s reach and also ensure the right message to the right audience at the right time.
• Engage Your Audience: Build a rich library of interactive responses that can be used when engaging with your followers. Prepare for all contingencies for the ability to respond to a variety of situations. Interacting with your audiences builds channel affinity and often results in increased engagement and post reach. Additionally, interactive responses should go beyond boilerplate ‘thank you’ messages to encourage greater engagement and drive traffic (eg. ‘We appreciate health care professionals like you, [name]. Help us spread the word by following us at…’).
• Test New Strategies with Paid Promotions: Social allows for real-time input globally and culturally. Constantly test paid promotion strategies to learn what is, and isn’t, successful for your channels. A/B test different audiences, days of the week, content types, times of day, and duration of boosts to find the winning formula for your channels.