- Jul 23, 2019
Social media is no longer only a networking place to connect with family and friends. Today, with the rise of online marketing, social media has opened numerous ways for businesses to build relationships and make connections with the targeted audience. Especially in an industry like healthcare where relationships play a vital role in driving engagement, social media enables medical professionals to reach out to patients, promote their practice, and strengthen doctor’s credibility.
For the healthcare industry, social media has become the place for finding reviews and searching for recommendations for the patients as well. An increasing number of patients today are turning to social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, etc., to know the doctors and learn about their success rate from existing patients for making informed decisions regarding the selection of any medical service. However, the success of social media marketing for a healthcare business greatly depends on the strategic approach and market understanding.
Here are some useful six tips to help healthcare businesses get started with effective social media strategy:
Have Fun with Your Healthcare Campaigns
We all know that healthcare deals with a lot of serious issues. However, it doesn’t mean that your healthcare social media marketing has to be dull and boring. Healthcare marketers can experiment and have fun with their healthcare campaigns. This kind of approach really helps in engaging and raising awareness on important matters. A similar strategy is adopted by United Healthcare that convinces its website visitors to actively take part in their monthly puzzles, quiz, and dare competitions.
Rather than developing campaigns with boring lectures on health, brands can make marketing fun and interesting affair for the audience by encouraging them to take charge of their wellness. If your campaigns on social media are attractive and unique, it will keep your patients engaged and hooked to your brand.
Share Valuable Insights and Medical Information
Social media helps to reach a wider audience and spread information. Healthcare brands can take advantage of social media to not only communicate but also share knowledge and useful medical information. From health and wellness tips to announcement of new medicine and technology, healthcare organizations can use various social media tools and website to build credibility through knowledge sharing.
A variety of healthcare information can be shared on your healthcare brand’s social profile, including:
- Introduction of new doctors in the hospital.
- Answering patient queries and general information searches related to health.
- Offering pre and post-operation care tips and advice.
- Latest medical technology launches, and updates.
- Healthcare services and product announcements.
- Health tips for a good lifestyle and more.
However, remember in no way you should share any patient-centric information on any platform as it is against HIPAA guidelines and regulations. Maintaining patient data privacy and security should always be a priority.
Use Infographic to Explain
Sharing important information is an integral part of a healthcare marketing campaign. However, healthcare marketers need to ensure that the content they share is easily digestible by their social media followers as well. Instead of using long texts, healthcare businesses can invest time and resource on creating easy-to-absorb and visually appealing content like infographics. If the information you provide through your social media posts is complicated and monotonous to read, then your followers will be least interested in going through your posts and may even think of no longer being associated with your brand’s social media profile.
The easiest way to get success with your social media strategy is to create simple and useful content in the form of an infographic that is easy to understand and takes less time to read. You can create infographics on various health topics related to your practice or healthcare business like wellness tips, marketing strategies, market trends, and more. It has been proved that visually appealing content is consumed more than lengthy texts, so it’s time for you to leverage the same policy for your social media marketing campaigns.
Optimize SEO Using Social Media
The moment patients make health-related queries on the search engine, not only your website appears; even your social media profile do appear. Hence, search engine optimization is a must part of your social media strategy as well. Not only it helps your website to rank high; if you want your healthcare brand to appear for organic searches even for non-branded keywords, then you must ensure that your social media profiles have search engine optimized content.
There are various ways to include keywords in your social media profile to make it SEO-friendly. Like you can include disease names and symptoms in the profile owner’s name or description, and even in the content, you share. Do not forget to mention your healthcare site link on your social media accounts for direct traffic. Make selection and use of the right keywords even while leveraging social media campaigns for your healthcare business. Search engine optimization is equally important here and if you want your social media profiles rank in the search results when patients search for them, then aligning SEO strategy with your social strategy is essential, and you must not miss it at any cost.
Conclusion
Today, potential new patients land up on your healthcare brand’s social media page first to check for recommendations, reviews, and testimonials. A majority of hospital bookings are based on social media reputation and other patient feedback. Moreover, around three-quarters of millennials search and schedule medical services mostly online, which makes it even more essential for healthcare businesses to build credibility and showcase a trustable image to the world through their social media profiles.
Hence, healthcare organizations must use social media to teach their followers about the various benefits and aspects of their healthcare products and services. The online world holds a lot of opportunities that medical organizations need to explore, or else they will end up losing potential leads. The above-discussed strategies will surely help all the healthcare marketers out there who are still deciding on their social media strategy and are unable to find out how to get started.
