Our "
Global social media" course is specifically designed for marketers in a global role who are creating global social media strategies. The course teaches a 6-step process for creating an effective and compliant global social media plan that can be rolled out in multiple countries. In the course we also provide our top tips for working with global social media influencers, plus a handy downloadable template that you can use to brief influencers. We've included the first 3 tips here to give you a headstart. Sign up to the course for more!
This may sound like an obvious one but it can absolutely trip you up! Before you get started, check whether your company already has a policy and process for working with social media influencers. It is important you see if you can access this before you make your plan to avoid contravening these guidelines and to make compliance conversations easier. These guidelines have likely worked through many compliance and legal considerations. If these are not in place in
your organisation, it can also be useful to enquire whether any other teams have implemented influencer work and discuss their learnings, process, and outcomes.
If you have key target countries in mind, it can also help to reach out to the local teams to align on specific guidelines or activities that have been implemented there. You may also find different legal regulations guiding influencer activities across countries. For example, the UK has strict guidelines that dictate how the influencer must disclose payment on their post using #ad or #advert, whereas in Australia this level of strict guidance does not apply.
It’s important to have a clear understanding of how you plan to work with influencers in your social media plans, as this will help to guide which influencers you select to work with. You will want to identify influencers who are likely to participate in the type of activity you have planned. Remember that not all
influencer work involves posting on someone’s social accounts, for a healthcare
professional you may be more focused on relationship building activities initially. As inspiration, below we’ve listed some examples of how you might engage influencers in your social media plans.
| Consultation & relationship building |
Co-creation |
Content creation |
| 1:1 consultation on materials |
Featuring an influencer in your social media content (e.g. in a video or image) |
Influencer posts content from their social media handle |
| Join a group feedback or discussion session about your social media activities |
Influencer does a social media take over and posts from your social media accounts (e.g. commentary on what’s happening at a congress) |
Influencer authors content on your company website to promote via social media |
| Attend an in person or virtual event / summits with other social media influencers |
Influencer joins a ‘live’ discussion (e.g. Twitter chat, LinkedIn live or Facebook live) |
Influencer creates content to use in your social media posts and adverts |
As you work through your global plan, you may find there are different ways that
people are using social media across countries in your plan. You may find in some countries that influencers will need to play a greater role. For example, if TikTok is big channel in the country you are targeting then creators are likely going to be key to your success there.
Conducting your search across multiple countries
When identifying the right influencers for your brand or campaign, start by listing
the countries each influencer will need to be used in. Do you need an influencer
who has a global reach and relevance that can translate across countries in your plan? Or do you need a local influencer who only needs reach and relevance in one country in your plan? Once you have this defined, you’ll want to check that their account followership and content engagement aligns with this brief.
Conduct your search in the language in which you need the influencer to work. For example, if you are searching for an influential French diabetes patient but you conduct your search analysis in English, you are likely to miss locally relevant influencers.
Some platforms, like TikTok and Facebook, are less accessible to social listening tools. You may want to consider working with a specialised agency who has a roster of influencers to help identify the appropriate healthcare influencers for your country.
Vetting
In pharma it’s very important to adequately vet an influencer. This exercise is to find individuals who are the right fit for the campaign, but also to help minimise risk.
Once you have a potential pool of influencers you will want to do the following:
- Score influencers for their suitability for your type of activity
- Score influencers based on their reach (with your desired audience and in the desired country), relevance (for your campaign topics) and engagement (the interactions they receive on their content)
- Consider how open this person has been to past sponsored collaboration, and whether they have partnered with pharma or healthcare companies in the past.
- Try to assess what their overall sentiment or attitudes might be towards working with pharma. This part of the search needs to be thorough to ensure they are not harbouring any anti-pharma views or have not posted any controversial materials in the past.
- Conduct an analysis on their following to check for fake followers. There are specialised tools that can help with this.
- Don’t be afraid to ask them to share back-end analytics to better analyse their content performance
To find out more we'd recommend joining our course on
Global social media to learn how to effectively, and compliantly, execute global pharma social media campaigns. You'll get the frameworks and tools to support local teams and their rollout using the Frankly Pharma 6-step process to creating your global social media plan.
Get started learning today
