There are a lot of times in life when I don't know what to do and so I ask myself:

WWMD? This is also known as What Would Mom Do?

So, when confronted with the question of:

How should social media marketing be handled for a new website focused on COVID-19?

I thought "What would Mom do?" and I came up with the following:

  1. Mom would tell people when there is something new on the web site in the same way that Mom always told people when something new was going on with her kids.
  2. Mom would say Thank You when appropriate.

Telling People About Something New

The first aspect of telling people about something new is that when something changes, you let them know. Yesterday, for example, we redesigned the entire covidnearme.org site and added a bunch of new features so I would argue for making social media posts to different sites like this:

  • Twitter - screen shot and a short message "Major changes - blah, blah"
  • Facebook - much the same
  • Instagram - a series of screenshots
  • Youtube - a short video talking about the home page

After doing that on Day 1 then I would follow that up with a set of posts about each individual feature such as:

  • Risk wizard
  • Symptom tracker
  • Hospital Experience

Saying Thank You

The next thing that I would do is I would use good manners and say thank you to the different technology providers that we use to make the site. Here's an example tweet that I made a few weeks ago:

I could not have built this as quickly without the awesome that is Jumpstart. Full tech stack and thank yous in More…

If you see the Powered By page on CovidNearMe, you could take each of the text blocks and make a tweet or other social media post from that text and that image. The important thing here is to cc / @ mention / # hash tag someone associated with the product. For example if you were making a post thanking the HoneyBadger product, it would be good to include @honeybadgerapp with the tweet. The idea of referencing the creator of the product is that it gives them an incentive to retweet / share this with their audience.