Quality Over Quantity: CMHA’s Winning Social Media Strategy on LinkedIn

With the range of social media platforms that are available in this current day, it can feel overwhelming for an organization to attempt to show a presence in every single one. As I learned this week in ICM 522, it’s actually counterintuitive to spread your resources too thin as it can result in a lack of quality. Experts such as Jerry Potter in his Five-Minute Social Media series actually recommend that companies should start on one social media platform first and expand once gaining stability.

This week, I wanted to focus on my current company: Community Mental Health Affiliates. Community Mental Health Affiliates is a leading provider of integrated health and behavioral healthcare systems for children, families, and adults. Primarily located in New Britain, CT but serving towns across the state, CMHA serves over 7000+ clients each year through a multitude of programs. When I first arrived at CMHA as their primary social media guru, the organization was managing 4 social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram). After taking a deep dive into their analytics, I realized that LinkedIn was clearly their strongest platform out of the 4. LinkedIn manages to consistently gain the most followers and many of the posts that we create have higher engagements compared to the rest. 

According to Quesenberry’s Social Media Strategy, “LinkedIn is a business-focused social networking service that allows users to create professional profiles of work experience and form connections with other professionals.” Due to HIPAA constrictions around our clients, I have to be careful about the type of content we post. This has resulted in our communication/marketing plan being more staff-focused than client-focused. With the combination of our staff-focused content and LinkedIn’s reputation as a place to find professional connections, it seems like a no-brainer that we primarily focus on LinkedIn as our go-to platform. Also, one of the major goals that we have as an organization is to find quality recruits for our staff. Social Media job hunting is extremely common on LinkedIn so if we were to improve upon our page and showcase our positive traits on LinkedIn better, that could easily result in an increase of applications to our current job openings. 

As we continue to grow our audience on LinkedIn, it’s important to recognize that every social media platform attracts a different audience. If one post garners a lot of engagement on LinkedIn, i.e. a congratulatory promotion post, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will perform just as well on Facebook or Instagram. As I grow more comfortable in the social media space, another point of realization is the dangers of cross-posting and not diversifying an organization’s content across each platform. With AI tools coming into the mix, I’ve had a great experience in using them to switch up the content, even if its a slight tweak to make each post different and unique somehow.