There are a lot of social media tools that can be used to help healthcare marketers do their job. By implementing the right tools, you can transform the way you interact with your audience, boost engagement and still reach your goals.
Megan Wright, a social media speaker and instructor, provides healthcare marketing best practices for health brands and organizations in her free e-book, Social Media Guidelines for Health Marketing. Learn how to navigate the often complicated landscape of social media – with tips for both non-profits and businesses.
Part I: Maximizing Impact
Social media has become a shorthand designation for person-to-person information shared using a wide variety of online and digital platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn. Most started as desktop applications, but all have experienced dramatic growth in their transition to mobile platforms.
Social media applications originally were designed to allow individuals to create self-defined networks of friends or like-minded strangers and share information, stories, links and pictures. As social media became more prevalent in the late 2000s, commercial interest exploded. Companies saw social media as another channel to deliver their messages to their audiences.
The problem is that very few social media users want to hear “corporate messages” and certainly don’t consider themselves an “audience.” Therefore, they weren’t attentive to companies’ early efforts to engage in this space. The core attribute of social media—user-defined networks of relationships—requires a fundamentally different way of engaging.
11 Keys to Success
Companies are not the sole source of trusted information on social media. In fact, most of the information that people rely on comes from friends, colleagues and in some cases organizations that they have self-selected to join their social networks. Research shows that 41% of users say social media would influence their choice of a doctor or hospital—and 9 out of 10 18- to 24-year olds would trust medical information others shared on social media. It’s important to remember that those 18- to 24-year olds are tomorrow’s patients, members and employees.
Clearly, social media is an essential communications tool, but one that requires a different dynamic and different skill set than traditional media. There are 11 keys to social media success that we will discuss in this article:
- Connect the dots.
- Have a plan.
- Tell a story.
- Answer the question.
- Get in shape.
- Take a risk.
- Trust the team.
- Listen and learn.
- Seize the day.
- Guard your flank.
- Revise, revise, revise.
1. Connect the Dots
Every healthcare organization has a series of mission-critical communities, including patients, caregivers and employees, as well as local, state and national stakeholders and leaders. Each community has its own unique infrastructure and culture. The active support of these mission-critical communities is fundamental to every organization’s long-term success.
The relationship between these communities and healthcare organizations is shifting. Each person may belong to many communities. Each considers him- or herself unique and will resist being treated as part of an “audience.” To garner the loyalty of these people whose active support is vital, organizations must engage with them on their terms and with their agreement.
It’s important to recognize that these communities overlap. For example, in delivery systems, nurses and doctors can become patients. Patients may be donors. Caregivers may play community leadership roles. For managed care organizations, as well as for pharma and device manufacturers, patients may learn of organizations through their physicians or a wide array of patient-focused third-party organizations. Social media quickly exposes any disconnects in what these overlapping communities are hearing. Therefore, it’s crucial to have one cohesive social media strategy to protect against delivering mixed messages to mission-critical communities.
2. Have a Plan
Design a campaign to engage the hearts and minds of mission-critical communities. Develop a message platform that is the core theme of your organization’s mission. In a political context, it was compassionate conservatism for President Bush, hope and change for President Obama. For healthcare organizations, it can be trust, quality, convenience or mission focus.
Many organizations develop their message platforms using a simple two-by-two box of us versus them. How would we describe ourselves? How would we describe our competition or our mission-critical communities? How does our mission-critical community describe itself? And how does that mission-critical community view us? This approach is fundamental to developing a message platform for social media because ultimately it becomes the guidepost to engaging in conversation with mission-critical communities.
We recommend forming a multistakeholder governance approach to developing a social media strategy across various communities. When creating a message platform, make sure to include all parts of the organization. The goal is to engage people, not audiences. Therefore, it’s very important to understand what’s happening from the outside in among your communities.
3. Tell a Story
The best campaigns are stories. Social media users are engaged in a continuous conversation with their networks of self-identified friends and relationships. Most folks are just listening. Some are posting to the community, looking to share something they found. Others react to the conversation, commenting on a post or a tweet. But whether listening, talking or reacting, social media is a conversation, not a message. If organizations simply view social media as a place to deliver a message—a different version of a newspaper or magazine—they won’t last long.
The challenge is to enter the conversation and begin to shape it gradually and consistently with the values of the people on the other end in a way that mirrors the organization’s message platform. It’s critical to frame the conversation in an authentic voice that mirrors how people actually talk to one another.
Use the rule of thirds. A third of the time, talk across platforms about brand awareness. A third of the time, focus on the community’s interests. And last, a third of the time, engage individuals in that community on a more personal level.
4. Answer the Question
Answer any questions. Don’t simply send a link or direct people to another page. Make it easy for people to find a doctor, make an appointment or learn about a treatment.
5. Get in Shape
Engaging mission-critical communities in conversation is a new skill. Get teams in shape. There’s no substitute for practice. Anyone playing an active role in social media strategy needs to have a hands-on appreciation for social media. This is not something that can be delegated. Each person on the team needs to listen through these new channels.
You gain credibility when senior leadership is actively engaged. Research shows that 82% of consumers are more likely to trust a company whose CEO is on social media—yet only 30% of Fortune 500 CEOs are on social media.
6. Take a Risk
Making the leap from the old world of messages delivered to audiences to engaging in conversation is a big jump. But it’s critical to start. Because as risky as social media can be, the bigger risk is not to engage.
7. Trust the Team
As organizations develop or redesign their social media, they need to trust their digital natives. The most compelling conversation-based strategies will come from colleagues who grew up with podcasts, posts and tweets.
Organizations should recruit their social media teams from their current staff. Employees know their organization’s culture, products and services better than anyone. Every organization has a lot of social media users among its employees with a deep understanding of the new environment. But don’t give them the keys to the car without reminding them of traffic rules. Have explicit social media policies in place, and ensure they are well understood and widely disseminated.
8. Listen and Learn
A critical part of any state-of-the-art social media strategy is the combined art of listening and learning. It’s important that your strategy includes continuously scanning the environment. Best-in-class organizations have established formal listening posts. Listen to what people are saying to learn how to engage in the conversation—and, more importantly, determine needed changes in business processes.
In addition, watch what people are searching for on Google. That’s just one of the diagnostic tools that can give organizations a heads-up they can use to refine and reshape conversations. It’s good to get “likes” on homepages and retweets of tweets, but it may be more important to engage with communities on their terms and in their networks.
It’s also critical to consider the value of participation and outward engagement. Don’t make community members always come to you. Engage them in conversations about their choice of hospitals, health plans and products. Consider the experience of the Mayo Clinic. The average number of listeners to Mayo’s podcasts jumped by 76,000 in a single month after it started using social media.
It’s important to remember that listening alone isn’t enough. Organizations need to be prepared to change based on what they learn. For example, a hospital in the Midwest picked up repeated complaints being retweeted about long wait times. The administrator was able to not only identify the issue but to resolve it. On the other side of the coin, organizations need to find ways to reinforce the positive feedback they hear on social media.
9. Seize the Day
To be an authentic voice in the conversation, organizations must be present in the constant focus groups that are being conducted online. There’s no room for delay.
Consider the time the lights went out during the Super Bowl a few years ago. A team of people at Oreo reacted in the moment and tweeted out the message that “You can still dunk in the dark.” It immediately got 15,000 retweets and 20,000 likes on Facebook. That’s just one example of how an organization reacting quickly to a change in circumstance can bring its brand to the forefront.
UCLA Health’s live-tweeting and Vining an entire brain surgery while the patient played guitar is another great example. The event formed an incredibly positive impression on many levels. People came away perceiving UCLA Health as technology-savvy, committed to its artist patient and medically sophisticated.
The key thing to remember is that time is the enemy in social media. Just 18 minutes after an initial tweet, half the retweets are done. The half-life for Facebook is 30 minutes and for YouTube is 7.4 hours. Organizations that can’t act in the moment get lost in the conversation.
10. Guard Your Flank
Social media is not a risk-free environment. Don’t assume that because a tweet’s half-life is 7 minutes, it’s gone from the record after that. It’s there forever. Use the coffee shop test. Anything not appropriate to talk about in a conversation over a cup of coffee in the hospital cafeteria or corporate lunchroom shouldn’t be talked about online.
There will be things that can’t be anticipated—from data breaches to malicious comments. Have a tested crisis management plan in place, and retest it quarterly, so people don’t fall out of practice.
11. Revise, Revise, Revise
Social media plans are good for about three months before either technology or the conversations being monitored significantly change. Failing to adapt plans will mean conversations get stale, understanding of the prevalent technology becomes out of date and organizations lose the credibility they gained over time.
Part II: Mitigating Risk
While there are risks associated with social media in any industry, regulatory constraints mean risks are heightened in the healthcare industry. With proper policies, training and monitoring, however, there’s no reason that healthcare organizations can’t use social media as effectively as others.
Megan Wright, a social media speaker and instructor, provides healthcare marketing best practices for health brands and organizations in her free e-book, Social Media Guidelines for Health Marketing. Learn how to navigate the often complicated landscape of social media – with tips for both non-profits and businesses.