Healthcare Social Media Marketing: 5 Practices for Success
Healthcare social media marketing has quickly become essential to any healthcare organization's marketing strategy. Your healthcare organization must build its brand presence on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, so you can connect with your audience and build trust among your potential patients.
More than ever, patients and potential patients are using social media to search for recommendations about their doctors and hospitals or to share their opinions on healthcare services.
1) Defining Your Goals
A successful social media strategy starts with setting goals. Goals can be quantitative (e.g., increase website traffic) or qualitative (e.g., provide more information about your company's mission).
Before you start, ask yourself what you want to accomplish and how social media will help you get there. Next, list the resources you have available to implement your plan. Then create a timeline that shows when each step should take place.
2) Understanding Your Audience
Successful social media marketing begins with understanding your audience. By analyzing the demographics and psychographics of those likely to be interested in your products or services, you can get a better sense of what they might want or need from your company.
You also want to consider your competitors. Who are they, and what social media presence do they have? What type of content do they share, and how often? Are they active on all relevant channels, or only a few? Where can you learn more about them, and which networks might be most beneficial in your campaign? Even if you're an established business with an existing following, it never hurts to see what others are doing.
3) Creating Engaging Content
The first step in successfully marketing your healthcare business through social media is creating engaging content. This means you should be posting updates to your company's Facebook and Twitter feeds daily and uploading videos on YouTube weekly at the minimum. If you have a blog, it's a good idea to update it with fresh content at least once weekly.
If you've been using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter personally, you know what kinds of content tend to grab people's attention. That same type of content is also effective when marketing your business on social media. One example of engagement-inducing content could be photographs, videos, or status updates that describe an interesting event at your company or new available products and services.
4) Posting Consistently
You'll want to post consistently on your social media channels. There's no need to post more than once a day, but posting more than once every other day is a good idea. You'll want to find out what times of the day are best for you and your audience to post on each channel and schedule accordingly.
Posting regularly will keep your fans engaged and returning to your social media channels. If you don't post consistently or wait days between posts, they may forget about you and move on to other businesses. You can lose followers if you aren't posting frequently enough.
5) Measuring Your Results
Measurement is the key to success in any marketing campaign, and social media is no exception. If you're not sure how to measure your results, here are five practices that can help you get started:
1. Monitor your social media activity with analytics tools like Hootsuite or Google Analytics
2. Ask your followers what they think of your posts with a simple post poll
3. Track the reach and engagement of your posts with a tool like BuzzSumo
4. Consider adding conversion tracking on your website, so you know when someone clicks through from one of your posts
5. Evaluate which channels (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) provide the best ROI
Measurement isn't a one-time thing, though. It's an ongoing process that keeps you on track and helps you make decisions about your social media efforts.
Conclusion
Social media is a great tool for healthcare marketing because it's a channel millions of people use daily.
Author Bio
A highly creative and motivated self-starter with exceptional project management skills and a strong ability to work independently desires the job of a Brand Marketing Coordinator at Healthcare Mailing, a leading provider of healthcare email list, physician mailing list, medical email list and healthcare related marketing services.