social media – Debbie Gillum Wakefield

2019, social media, Uncategorized, work, work sample

November National Pet Cancer Awareness Month Campaign for MedVet

December 2, 2019February 9, 2020 Debbie

Overview: November is National Pet Cancer Awareness Month and MedVet ran a campaign on social media to engage and educate our audience about cancer in pets. Medical Oncology and Radiation Oncology are unique life-saving services that MedVet hospitals offer to pets.

Goal: See a 15% increase from last month in Shares and Interactions. (Last month we had 8,074 Interactions and 1,464 Shares, so our goal is 9,286 Interactions and 1,683 Shares).

Results: We did not meet our goal. We had 3,428 Interactions and 501 Shares on our Facebook posts for this campaign. For comparison, our October campaign had 2,040 interactions and 850 Shares and was for only 10 days rather than 30 days like this campaign.

Our overall numbers were down for the month of November. All our Facebook posts had 6,334 Interactions and 1,168 Shares. Compared to October, overall we saw a 19% decrease in Interactions and Shares.

I think I underestimated how Share-worthy the Pet Cancer Awareness Month content was. I was surprised at how few Shares and Interactions Titan’s video received as well as some of the infographics. I think perhaps information on pet cancer is less “shareable” than information on keeping your pet safe over the holiday.

In the future, I’m going to prioritize Facebook content about pet owner safety information that’s holiday focused. My next campaign will be focused on the 12 Dangers of Christmas (it’s a veterinarian’s take on the classic 12 Days of Christmas, get it?)

Campaign Assets with screenshots of their posts:

About 50 of canine cancers are treatable if caught early — November is Pet Cancer Awareness Month. While cancer in pets cannot be prevented, it can be treated if caught early. Talk to your family veterinarian if you notice any changes in your pet’s lifestyle like loss of stamina, loss of appetite or new lumps or bumps.

Coping with a cancer diagnosis isn’t easy. What words of encouragement would you share with pet owners whose pets are fighting cancer?

What is a veterinary oncologist — A common question we are asked is “What’s a veterinary medical oncologist?” They are board-certified veterinarians who treat common and rare cancers in pets. They use state-of-the-art equipment and advanced techniques to safely and effectively diagnose and treat various forms of cancer. Read more about veterinary medical oncology: https://hubs.ly/H0lD3rd0

Preventing Cancer in Pets — November Social November Social 100% 10 There are steps you can take to lower your pet’s risk of developing cancer. Always spay or neuter your pets, limit their sun exposure, keep them at a healthy weight, avoid secondhand smoke, and most importantly, schedule annual wellness check-ups for your pet with your family veterinarian. Screen reader support enabled. There are steps you can take to lower your pet’s risk of developing cancer. Always spay or neuter your pets, limit their sun exposure, keep them at a healthy weight, avoid secondhand smoke, and most importantly, schedule annual wellness check-ups for your pet with your family veterinarian.

When is the right time to check for oral cancer? Anytime they say “AHHH!” Take the opportunity to examine your pet’s mouth for unusual masses while they are sedated for an anesthetic procedure or anytime your pet yawns. For more information about cancer detection for your dog or cat, talk to your family veterinarian.

How to talk to your kids about your pet going through cancer treatments — Telling a child their pet has cancer is something many parents would prefer to avoid. However, no matter the child’s age, being honest about a pet’s diagnosis can be beneficial for you and your children. Be prepared for reactions of anger, sadness, and guilt. Reassure them that it’s not their fault. Together, remember some of the fond memories you shared.

Types of Radiation Treatments — It can be scary when your best buddy is diagnosed with cancer. At MedVet, we offer different types of Radiation Therapy Treatments to safely and effectively treat cancer in pets. Read some FAQs about Radiation Oncology services: https://www.medvetforpets.com/frequently-asked-questions-faq-radiation-oncology-dogs-cats/

November Cancer Awareness Month_What side effects can chemotherapy cause — Most patients tolerate chemotherapy very well and maintain an excellent quality of life during a chemotherapy treatment protocol. Approximately 80-85% of patients have minimal to no side effects from chemotherapy. Patients typically are sent home with anti-nausea and anti-diarrheal medications for use as needed. Because the priority in veterinary medical oncology is to maintain a patient’s high quality of life, veterinary medical oncologists use doses and schedules of chemotherapy with the goal of minimizing side effects. Learn more: https://www.medvetforpets.com/specialty/medical-oncology/

Possible signs of cancer — As National Pet Cancer Awareness Month winds down, learn some of the early signs of canine cancer. If you notice any of these symptoms, make an appointment to see your family veterinarian to discuss your pet’s specialty healthcare options.

Throughout the month, we also highlighted local patient stories on Facebook.

buddy facebook medvet — Sharing real stories of patients who have beaten cancer.

meeet queenie

Before I created graphics for this campaign, I did some research about what other groups had posted. I was really inspired by the graphics that AAHA had created and shared.

cancer nov inspiration — Inspiration from the AAHA Facebook page for this campaign

social media, Uncategorized, work, work sample

A simple recipe for Facebook succuss

November 7, 2019February 9, 2020 Debbie

I like social media marketing because I’m always learning and experimenting. The main ingredient of a strong social media strategy should be innovation.

Recently, I shared on MedVet’s Facebook pages a recipe for dog treats, as part of a larger Halloween Pet Safety campaign. I got the idea from another animal hospital’s Facebook page and saw the high levels of engagement their post was getting. So, in Canva, I made this graphic for Facebook and added this post to my content calendar in Google Sheets. I made sure to give credit in the lower right-hand corner to the blog where I got the recipe from.

Sharing a treat recipe was something MedVet had never done before. I knew our audience loved pet safety tips, education, and helpful insights. From tracking the best performing post each week, I knew those types of posts had performed well in the past. I was pretty confident this recipe would be something of value to our followers and would be appreciated. My hypothesis paid off and the post was a success across our 24 Facebook pages, getting as many as 63 shares! I hope to share other treat recipes in the future, perhaps themed for Thanksgiving or Christmas.

Screen Shot 2019-11-06 at 8.45.26 PM — 58 Shares!

2019, social media, Uncategorized, work, work sample

MedVet Halloween Pet Safety Facebook Campaign

November 7, 2019February 9, 2020 Debbie

I want to talk about the Halloween Pet Safety social media campaign I ran for MedVet.
Campaign Goal: Increased brand awareness. Make sure MedVet is top of mind for pet owners in case their pet faces an after-hours medical emergency.
We will measure the number of post shares.

Over October 20-31, our goal is to see a 15% increase in the number of Shares on all Facebook Pages
From September 20-30, 2019, we saw 286 total Shares on Facebook across all our Pages, so our goal was to see an increase of 43 shares, so we aim to see 329 Shares.

Campaign Results: On November 3, I looked at the analytics to see how many Shares across all our 24 Facebook Pages these Halloween Pet Safety posts had gotten.

I used HubSpot to schedule the posts and track the success of the campaign. In HubSpot, I marked each post related to this campaign “Halloween 2019” so I could easily pull a report only on posts for the campaign

We far exceed our goal of 329 Shares. We got 845 Shares!

Screen Shot 2019-11-06 at 8.38.28 PM — Far exceeding our goal of 345 Shares.

Purpose: To use our emergency veterinary expertise to educate pet owners about the dangers of pets accidentally ingesting chocolate.

Our desired reaction from the campaign was for users to share the Facebook post with their friends and family. We also want them to remember the key idea that MedVet is open 24/7 in case of a pet emergency and provides expert

Opportunity: Become the trusted source for accurate and easy-to-share pet safety information on Facebook.

When: October 20-31 on MedVet’s 24 Facebook pages

Target audience: Pet owners and those who currently like a MedVet Facebook page

Tone: Knowledgable, expert, pet-loving

Key messages:

Even in small amounts, chocolate may cause serious health problems if ingested by your pet. Chocolate toxicity can
cause vomiting, diarrhea, increased heart rate, heart failure, seizures, and in some cases even death.

While chocolate is a favorite treat of ours, it can be harmful, sometimes fatal, to our canine companions. With
Halloween right around the corner, please remember to keep all chocolate and other candy, such as raisins, sugar-free
candy, and sugar-free gum, safely out of reach of curious noses!

Dogs and cats are particularly sensitive to a chemical in chocolate, coffee and tea called theobromine. Theobromine is found in very high levels in bakers and dark chocolate. If a dog eats a lot or is a smaller dog, milk chocolates can
cause problems too. Be careful when you have chocolate in your home and keep your four-legged friends far away from Halloween baskets this year!

Campaign Assets:

Camapign in action:

2019, august, social media, Uncategorized, work, work sample

Sharing the news of MedVet Chicago’s brand-new hospital on Facebook and LinkedIn

August 31, 2019February 9, 2020 Debbie

Last week I traveled for work to Chicago to support the opening of a brand-new state-of-the-art veterinary emergency hospital.

Another Marketing team member and I drove to different referral partners (this is what we call veterinary practices that refer patients to MedVet’s emergency and specialty hospitals) around Chicago. We told the staff about our new hospital opening up, explained the phone number was staying the same and how we were expanding our services.
I admit it was outside of my comfort zone a bit because I don’t usually have a lot of face-to-face interactions with veterinarians, practice managers or our referral partners. I prefer to stay behind-the-scenes as support, but I can certainly muster up the courage and extroverted side of my personality and talk to new people. I learned a lot from the team members I was with about how we speak about MedVet to referral partners and how MedVet is perceived by others.

We were able to take a tour of the new hospital in Chicago before it opened to the public and I was blown away by how large it is. I believe it’s 6,000 square feet. The old hospital was comprised of two different buildings with multiple floors so doctors and clients had to do a lot of walking up and down flights of stairs. This new hospital is all one floor, which I’m sure the staff is very excited about.

The day the new hospital opened, I set into action my digital marketing plan that I’d made with the Chicago Regional Marketing Director to update the hospital address across our digital channels. I updated our address on our:

Facebook page
Yelp page
Google My Business listing
Apple Maps
Multiple spots on our website

Updating an address online is important but this felt more important than normal because the stakes were higher. We needed to ensure that no one accidentally drove to the old hospital, especially during an emergency with their pet.

As part of this plan to tell our audience about our Chicago hospital moving, I worked closely again with the Chicago Regional Marketing Director and the Marketing leadership to write a press release that was shared on our website and distributed through PR Newswire.

I posted on Facebook and LinkedIn. I wanted to take a moment to talk about how well those two posts did.

We posted on the Chicago hospital’s Facebook page about the move and boy, did that post explode. I mean, it was a positive explosion of engagement.

chicago medvet hospital facebook — This Facebook post had the most engagement in MedVet’s history. I admit I wasn’t expecting this strong of a reaction from our Facebook audience to this news. I should’ve expected it because at Volunteers of America, I’d actually experienced something similar where a post about the grand opening of our new Pickerington thrift store has uncharacteristically high engagement. I learned that social media posts about new locations tend to go viral.

page analytics facebook medvet chicago — You can see we gained 479-page likes in just one week; a huge increase from our normal growth. More importantly than the increase in page likes, we saw a 537% increase in Post Engagements.

facebook likes increase chicago medvet — Before this post, we had 4,624 likes. After the post, we has 5,099 page likes. That’s a 475 increase!

chicago medvet facebook likes — Showing the increase in Page Likes through a visual graph.

We also shared the news of the new hospital on LinkedIn and again, our audience was very excited, resulting in high levels of engagement.

You can see the copy of the LinkedIn post is very similar to the Facebook post copy but we chose to use two images rather than just one.

Screen Shot 2019-08-31 at 1.26.12 PM — In our LinkedIn strategy, one of our goals is to gain more engagement in the form of comments so we were pleased to see six comments on this post where we usually only see 1-2 comments on a post.

linkedin analytics medvet — You can see here how this post had significantly higher engagement and impressions that our previous posts.

2019, social media

What I learned from the presentation “Social Media Strategy For Small Businesses”

August 8, 2019 Debbie

Tonight I went to a presentation called Social Media Strategy For Small Businesses at Haven Collective. I heard about the event from the Robles Design email newsletter that highlights cool upcoming marketing-related events for entrepreneurs in Columbus. This event peaked my interest because I always like hearing from other social media pros and learning from their expertise. (If you’re not learning, what are you even doing, bro?) Carissa Richardson led the event. She owns her own company Kindred Strategy, after working at different agencies and brands for 13+ years.

She talked about the difference of organic and paid posts on social media. She made the excellent point that organic posts won’t grow your following. You need to put money behind your top performing organic posts and show those to a more narrow audience, such as a custom or lookalike audience (which is more targeted than using the Interests targeting.) I like to boost the previous week’s top performing post. This statement struck me because too often business owners think the goal of social media is to grow their following and that will happen if you post organically. False. You should strategically target your posts and invest in paid social media.

Carissa briefly talked about engaging with your audience and how important it is to respond. With that being said, she addressed the elephant in the room: what to do when, (not if) someone leaves a negative comment. She suggested to post a canned response that asks the person to take the conversation offline, like “We’re so sorry to hear you had a less than ideal experience with us. Please email debbie.gillum@brand.com so we can discuss this further.” She made the point that this sort of safety net policy in place can help leadership folks feel comfortable posting on social media. I would argue that posting a copy-and-paste response each time someone complains would fan the fire. It’s like if you called a company to complain about a service and instead of reaching a human you only got the automated voice. You’d get more mad. I think you should empower whoever is managing your social media to customize that response to address what they wrote. I’m still advocating that you take the conversation offline and follow that best practice, but I think canned responses make a brand feel robotic and can aggravate fans.

My favorite part of the presentation were Carissa’s steps to creating a social media strategy

Define your social media goals. If you’re looking to grow your business your social media goal might be to increase your website traffic or grow your brand awareness and increase your post’s impressions and reach.
Audit your current social media channels. Look out for duplicate pages, old accounts and take inventory of how many followers each account has.
Build audience personas. Use existing data to create a fictional character of your customer. What are their needs? Pain points? Values?
Choose your platforms. Check Google Analytics to see what social platforms are currently working to refer traffic to your website.
Competitor Inventory. What are they doing? What can you do better?
Establish your brand voice. This also involves creating your social media mission statement which is something like “BRAND creates social content to BENEFIT for AUDIENCE.” Example: “Volunteers of America creates social media content to help thrifty shoppers save money.”
Develop a content strategy. A good idea is to post 1/3 Engaging 1/3 Curated and 1/3 Promotional. For curated content, keep a list of websites, blogs, authors who fit with your brand and subscribe to their newsletter. I like to set up Google Alerts for keywords related to the brand.
Create a measurement plan. How will you track your success? I like to measure weekly analytics and one of my most important metric is looking at what post performed the best that week. That influences my future content.

Thank you to Yasmine of Robles Design, Carissa Richardson of Kindred Strategy and Haven Collective for working together to put on such an educational event.

2019, social media, Uncategorized, work, work sample

How a Facebook Post Can Evolve Through Teamwork

July 17, 2019February 9, 2020 Debbie

I wanted to highlight a recent example of how a Facebook post went from concept to publishing and the beauty of how that idea evolved and changed through collaboration.

Concept: Hurricane Barry was barreling right into the path of our New Orleans and Mandeville MedVet hospitals so we were concerned about pets being displaced.
The Regional Marketing Partner reached out suggesting we post on Facebook if lost pets are brought into the hospital. The hospital was set up to temporarily shelter any found pets during the storm. I agreed this was a great idea and set out to make a “found pet” template in Canva.

This was my first draft. I knew it needed to have the pet’s picture, pet’s information and be on brand. I wanted a simple and straightforward design.

This is the second draft, that the Regional Marketing Partner made. I was really impressed by the sense of urgency this post conveys and the icon in the top left corner which could add consistency if we used this template on multiple posts.

Based on feedback from my manager, and from consulting our graphic designer, the post was revised a third time. The background color became lighter, the top left icon changed and we used our brand’s emergency color which is red.

So, after a couple days of back and forth and making three drafts, we needed to use this post template.

This dog was displaced in Hurricane Barry and we used the social post template our team created to find her owners and get her back home safely.

Over the weekend, a female chocolate lab came into our Mandeville hospital. We posted on Facebook about her, using our new template, and it worked! She found her owners.

2019, social media, work sample

MedVet Facebook Posts I Created

July 11, 2019February 9, 2020 Debbie

I’m proud to share some of the Facebook posts that I created for all of the 24 MedVet Facebook pages recently. My goal with the content creation has been to engage our audience while still maintaining our commitment to leading specialty healthcare for pets. I’m learning that our audience loves to interact with us, whether it’s sharing pet photos or answering our questions. I made these graphics in Canva and wrote the copy.

This informative post was targeted to cat-owners looking to learn more about what symptoms of arthritis to look out for.

We’re fortunate to have a strong base of digital cheerleaders who leave MedVet glowing 5 star reviews on Facebook, Google, Yelp and other sites. I wanted this post to thank our supporters as well as subtly encourage others to leave us a review.

Here’s another informative post we did to help pet owners protect their pets from snakes. With the temperatures rising and more dogs outside this time of year, the hospital emergency rooms often see an increase of pets coming in suffering from snake bites. I wanted this post to give practical steps a pet owner could take to snake-proof their life.

I was proud of how clever this post was. I’d like to repurpose it again closer to Halloween and Valentine’s Day too.

To increase engagement, I created this post asking our audience to guess the name of this dog. I struggled to think of a hint that would be helpful but not too easy. My hint ended up being “4+2=” and most people correctly guessed his name was Six. Our audience loved this post, not only because they got to interact with us and each other but also because they got to learn more about a police dog.

This post was a two-for-one engagement driver. Not only did we ask people to comment True or False, we also asked our audience to visit the blog post on our website to learn more about skunks. (Oh and the answer is True.)

This post drove engagement and educated pet owners about micro chipping. Polls on Facebook Pages are a relatively new feature and I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to ask our audience a simple question and try out this type of content.

The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of MedVet.

2018, work, work sample

Giving Tuesday

November 28, 2018November 28, 2018 Debbie

Happy Giving Tuesday! aka That-Day-Every-Nonprofit-Asks-or-Begs-For-Money

TL;DR: I was disappointed that we didn’t see more engagement on Giving Tuesday but now we have a new opportunity to do better with our upcoming End of Year giving campaign.

I admit Giving Tuesday was a bit anti-climatic, what with all the hype starting, back in the summer. I subscribe to a lot of non profit marketing newsletters and I can’t count the number of emails and webinars claiming to spell out the perfect Giving Tuesday strategy. It’s like Black Friday for retailers. (Side note to retailers: Cyber Tuesday is not a thing. Let us have this one day.)
For this year, I admit we didn’t spend as much time as we could’ve strategizing about how to differentiate ourselves among the #GivingTuesday herd. We used a lot of the images that National (voa.org or Volunteers of America, versus the affiliate Volunteers of America Ohio & Indiana that I work at) provided to us. I made a couple of unique images for us in Canva. I didn’t use the copy from National exactly because I felt it wasn’t uplifting, donor centric or on-brand for us. I wrote my own variations.
I spent like half of Monday last week sitting down, and scheduling out in AgoraPulse all our Thanksgiving and Giving Tuesday social media posts. We’ve got two Twitters, two Instagrams, a Facebook page plus 9 thrift store Facebook pages- oh, and LinkedIn, so it’s a lot. By the end, I was really proud of myself. I had laid out and scheduled in advance these important posts across all our channels. And, I did some boosting of posts and events on Instagram and Facebook as well as ran some Facebook Ads. We spent about $100.
In my head, since I put so much time and effort into these posts and thought I did a great job, I naively expected to be overwhelmed with Likes, Comments, Shares and Messages saying “Wow this social media post changed my life!” (Just kidding on that last one. I’m not quite that delusional.)
Alas, it was pretty much crickets. One woman did comment how she didn’t want to donate on Facebook and that she would donate “thru her nank.” I think she meant to say bank. Yeah, not the engagement I was hoping for.

I told my boyfriend Nate about this on the phone today and saying it all out loud helped me realize that I can’t get bent out of shape over people not engaging or responding to my posts. That’s social media, ya’ll. That’s life.
Keep in mind, these were mostly posts about giving, donating, fundraising. These were not the most hilarious, shareable, viral posts.
Thinking more about it, we don’t typically do these hard-asks of “Donate Now!” of our audience. I try to share meaningful and positive posts, celebrating our amazing supporters. I try to do the Jab, Jab, Punch method of sprinkling, or jabbing, helpful content and then here in November and December we do more punching with the Give Back posts.

When one campaign ends, another begins. Giving Tuesday is out and now End of Year giving is in. Okay, in an ideal world of butterflies and rainbows, I’d already have this campaign all figured out, but we merged our affiliate with Indiana this summer, I got a new boss, our team has grown and things have been hectic across the organization. All I can do is focus on the now. Today, I used a Creative Brief template that my old boss, Stephanie, came up with and that we used before. It’s helpful for me to use to spell out the

Goal
Objective
Tone
Creative
Deliverables
Look & Feel
Assets

of the campaign. I like to say that it helps me get my ducks in a row (this is my new favorite phrase. I just like picturing a bunch of scattered ducks and me herding them into a single file line.)

Instagram post on Nov. 27
Facebook post. I made graphic and wrote the copy.
Tweet.
Tweet that partially came from GivingTuesday.org I used their image and some of their copy.
Facebook. Someone donated $5! We boosted this post and that really helped a lot.
Focusing on Lawrence, using him in a lot of posts. I made this graphic and wrote the copy.
Our Facebook profile photo and Cover Photo.
I was inspired to write this copy by a po
st I saw on Instagram that used #GivingTuesday and I wanted to emphasize that it’s not about how rich you are or how much you can give. It’s about giving back.
Our Twiter cover photo. Consistency among social media channels.