Make this year’s Medicare Annual Election Period the best ever. If you really want to get noticed, your promotional plans should include social media, especially Facebook.
Yes, Medicare Enrollees Are on Facebook
Facebook may have started as a site for college students, but it’s evolved into a site for everyone. According to Pew Research Center, most U.S. adults report using Facebook. This includes 65 percent of people between the ages of 50 and 64, and 41 percent of people aged 65 or older.
That’s a significant number of people who are eligible for Medicare or soon will be!
And people who use Facebook tend to use it a lot. The Pew Research Center found that 51 percent of Facebook users log in several times a day, and 23 percent log in about once a day.
This means that when you post on Facebook, you have a great audience. You can use this fact to promote AEP.
Post content people want.
People go online for many reasons: to shop, to entertain themselves, to learn, and so on. Provide people with content they want, and they’ll start coming to you.
Medicare insurance agents can do this by posting useful information. It doesn’t have to be about AEP specifically. You can post about related topics, like warnings against Medicare scams and important health news – anything that would interest your clients. One way to easily share content is to repost information from WAP’s Facebook page.
Post frequently.
To make your Facebook page work for you, you need to post regularly.
You might be wondering exactly how often is often enough – and multiple people have asked the same question. In fact, studies have been done to find a clear answer.
According to HubSpot, how often you should post depends on the number of followers you have. Pages with more than 10,000 followers saw the most engagement with 31 to 60 posts a month. On the opposite end on the spectrum, pages with 200 or fewer followers did best with one to five posts a month.
Depending on the details of your situation, your sweet spot could be anywhere between once a week to twice a day. The key is to keep posting. You don’t want to go months without posting anything.
Promote posts.
Sometimes natural engagement isn’t enough. If you have a great post that you want people to see, you can opt to have it promoted. This is a way to widen the reach of the post.
When you promote a page, you can select who you want to target. Two options are especially relevant: location and age.
The cost for page promotion varies significantly depending on how many people you’re trying to reach. For $30, you can reach an estimated 4,600 to 8,5000 people. For $400, you can reach an estimated 38,000 to 71,000 people.
To get started, see Facebook’s explanation of promoted posts.
Create an ad.
Running an ad is another way to widen your reach on Facebook. Ads let you target your ideal audience with even more precision. For example, you can choose to show your ad to people based on their age, their interests, their behaviors or even their birthday month.
When creating a Facebook ad, you set a budget, so you won’t pay more than you can afford.
To get started, see Facebook’s explanation of ads.
If you want to learn even more about using Facebook to grow your business, check out the Facebook Blueprint. There are free online courses you can take to improve your marketing skills.
Follow these compliance tips.
- Keep the information generic – such as the A,B,C and D’s of Medicare, and changes happening in the members area.
- Do not use carrier names, benefits or logos.
- If someone “likes” your piece, remember this is not a permission to contact, if you get a question or comment on FB, you may address it globally, but not individually.
- Instruct interested parties to visit your website to learn more or to contact you if additional information is needed or wanted.
Make sure to follow WAP’s Facebook page for post ideas and shareable content.
