The Effective Use of Social Media in Healthcare Marketing

The following are excerpts from the first session.

“What are the most common pitfalls of using social media as a healthcare marketing tool? What should an organization do to mitigate these risks?”

Dean Browell

These are not actually our tools. They are tools for our audiences. We [in healthcare] are often coming late to these. It is unlike the way we look at traditional marketing, whether it is a billboard or whatever.

It is their tool, so that ends up affecting things like messaging. It is not just broadcasting, but also understanding that this is a place where people converse and engage. In order to mitigate these risks, it is about finding out what channels are effective in your area; I say the area in terms of your specific audience as well as your geographic area. As a healthcare marketing tool, we are not the only ones using it. Some of these forms of message boards have been around for ten, to fifteen years.

“Dean, as a follow-up, please complete this sentence: “Under any circumstance, you must be certain to.”

Ensure that your audience is actually on a channel before rushing in. Even in Richmond, people use Twitter differently than they do in Norfolk. A different demographic is using it in Richmond. It is easy to use search. Go to twitter.com do an advanced search and look at who is tweeting in a given geographic area. For example, if there are no young moms there, you do not need to be marketing a maternity campaign on Twitter; your audience is literally not there.

Dan Dunlop

Once you have learned, “… this is where my audience is, these are the platforms they are using,” then the big pitfall is treating these tools and these platforms as [traditional] media vehicles,[having a staff person] treat a platform like Facebook or Twitter in the same manner that they have treated radio or television advertising or direct mail.

What I see throughout the healthcare industry is people using platforms just to blast out content. They become content pushers. That is certainly not an effective use of these platforms. Stop thinking about them as media tools and think about them as platforms for community building. These are community-building platforms, and they are best used when they are niche community-building. Try to find that area of commonality and then address that and bring those people together who have that shared interest.

Dan, please complete this sentence: “Above all else you must ––––.”

Dedicate the resources to do this effectively. There is this mythology that social media is free and does not take many resources. To do it right, to be engaged in these conversations and make these conversations part of these online communities, you have to dedicate the resources. You have to have community managers on your team who do this for a living, and who are good at it. Above all, you have to be committed.

David Harlow

Before jumping in and expecting everyone to read and enjoy seeing your messages, you need to figure out where exactly you are engaging. You need to develop social capital in these forums, and that does not happen overnight.

You can mix this together with paid advertising, but it is a mix of organic and paid strategies that is going to help you get a toehold in the conversation. Some people will skip over that and just try to have the conversation, and wonder why nobody is participating.

From my special perspective on the legal front, the risks are many. It’s not just about HIPAA; which is often raised as a first concern when people are talking about social media and healthcare. Obviously, it is important not to reveal patient confidence online. It can be tricky because sometimes patients will reveal their own confidences online and you need to be careful how you respond to something like that in an online forum of any sort.

“Makala, looking back, what was the most unforeseen yet serious curve in the road that the Mayo Clinic had in developing its social media program? What could you have done to minimize or eliminate it from happening in the first place?”

One of the biggest things we learned early on was to reserve our presence on social media platforms. So when we went to Myspace, fortunately for us, Myspace did not take off in the same way Facebook did – but when we went to Myspace to create our presence, a rock band named the Mayo Clinic had actually beat us there. When Facebook came out, it was easy to say to leadership, ‘We do not want that to happen, we want to be able to reserve the name early on.’ Since then, we have been quick to not jump on the platforms, but to at least evaluate whether a presence would be helpful or not.

“Think ten to twenty years from now in healthcare: in what ways will the social media landscape be different? Dan, what are your thoughts about where it is going, and what folks need to do to position themselves for that eventuality?”

Dan Dunlop

The key is to be nimble and to adapt as things change. Things change quickly. Even with existing social media platforms: Foursquare split off and formed two different platforms–– Swarm and Foursquare; each is different in what they’re trying to do. If you’re not paying attention, you miss those things today. It is critical that you pay attention and stay engaged in what is going on in social media. So when something comes out, like Pinterest…when it first launched, I jumped on the bandwagon and joined Pinterest, not because I thought I needed to be pinning recipes, but because I needed to know how it worked and how it might impact the audiences we try to engage.

My hope is that in ten to twenty years, social media will be easier to integrate into everyday life and that it will not require as much work as it requires right now.

Makala Johnson

What we can predict is an increase in internet access and users across the globe. A Forbes article said that in 2020 there would be over 5 billion internet users, over half of them accessing it on hand-held devices. We know there is going to be greater internet interconnectivity – from our perspective – between patients and a big opportunity for researchers, in particular.

One example would be filling clinical trials, or finding patients with rare diseases or conditions that perhaps in the future will already be coalesced [in a community]. This has already started to take place, but it will be exponentially more common in the future when people of similar health interests have already coalesced into a group.

“What has been the most effective way to build community on social media?”

David Harlow

You need to determine who you are reaching out to. Find out what the commonalities are. There needs to be a common bond. It is hard to determine online versus in person, but with more metrics and measurements and information available online there are ways we can do that. It does not have to be about the topic you are trying to start a conversation about. There are going to be secondary things that people are interested in as well.

Makala Johnson

We need to ask our audience base what they are interested in, engage them with questions, or whatever method we decide to use. We need to be able to look at these data and if it is not working, stop doing it and optimize our posts.

It is crucial that we take a hard look at the communities themselves and understand how they are operating, and how they choose to be interacted with. They are giving off social cues, in the same way that someone in the room with you gives off cues as to how they would like to be talked to. These communities do the same. It is important that we listen as opposed to creating generic ways of interaction.

Dan Dunlop

People are natural community builders. It is in our nature; we look for commonality. When you meet someone for the first time, you ask each other questions. Part of that process is looking for, ‘What do we have in common? What brings us together? Where are the bonds?’

We need to do the same thing with our online community-building and social media efforts. This applies to consumer audiences but it also applies to business audiences. Looking at physicians, hundreds of thousands of physicians belong to private, online physicians’ communities. It is not just about people getting together and talking about breweries and beer on Facebook. There are business people getting together and sharing information through these communities because they have commonalities.

“How can we examine the demographics of users on social media platforms?”

Dan Dunlop

It is highly variable depending on the platform. For instance, on Facebook, you can get great data through Facebook analytics, just through your account: who the users are, their age, and their sex. You have to do what everybody else does—get online and Google and find the resources that work for you.

Dean Browell

In some of these cases, broaden your definition of ‘social.’ For example, we found a forum for Watermen, for fishermen, in eastern North Carolina; they talked about healthcare, they talked about the fish they caught that morning. They were all over sixty and people that would say they were not on social media if you asked them. So sometimes it’s about finding the channel. In this case, just by scanning it or even hand coding it, you would know exactly what the demographics are based on how they are talking and what their profiles say. I echo what everyone else said in terms of trying to find the most statistically-based insight like Facebook has. It can unlock a lot for you.

“I do not hear young people talking about Facebook at all; I hear Instagram, Snapchat, etc. What programs are you starting to pay attention to?”

David Harlow

Instagram is a good example. I use it to share photos, but I know people of other generations use it for other purposes. You need to stay abreast of the latest tools out there. Not only the tools but the way they are used by different populations.

Makala Johnson

We have an Instagram account. But there are new [platforms] introduced every day. Wait until there is a certain amount of people on them or a user base. But something like Snapchat, as an example, not that we are not on it at Mayo Clinic, but we have at least read and learned how other organizations are using it to reach their audience.

Dean Browell

It is about how people are using these platforms. When you see things like YikYak and Snapchat, that is, they are used for messaging. That is different than how people are using Facebook. Many teens still are on Facebook, they just know how to use privacy lists so that you never see anything they post. Twitter is still huge. I would just be careful about the shiniest object syndrome. Just one quick example. We just finished a massive project for the Department of Behavioral Health in Virginia, looking at substance abuse and mental health issues by only using Twitter on a county-by-county basis. And I can tell you flat out, that there are plenty of teens, tweens, and early twenty-somethings still using Twitter, even in the most rural and urban areas in our state. Look at the behavior, it will tell you whether they have abandoned something or whether they are just using a different platform for a different reason.

Dan Dunlop

Do not overlook the platforms that are already there. I am shocked when I go into organizations and they do not even have a page on Google+. Google will assign you a page, but they have not populated it with any information. If you are at all interested in a search, you need to be on Google+. LinkedIn is such an undervalued platform. You have to study your audience and their use of media. Understand these platforms and how they perform because there is so much you could be doing with Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.

“Do you have any ideas for bringing a specific department i.e. occupational health, onto social media? Our parent organization is already doing lots of social media and has hired help to do this, but we have not yet integrated our specific departmental information into it.”

Makala Johnson

We have many different departments at the Mayo Clinic. We do internal consults of the different areas to see whether what they are hoping to push out would be effective on our Mayo Clinic Twitter and Facebook accounts. If not, or if they have too much content in terms of how frequently they want to post, then it makes sense to break off and have a separate account so they can reach their niche audience.

Dean Browell

It is about creating an environment where they cannot do so much but then can see the effectiveness of it. I would first align them and their targets. Especially with occupational health, LinkedIn would sound like an easy group. Start with a group so that they can see how it’s going to work. I favor internal use, a bit more like when you get a new fish, you put it in a little plastic baggie on the side of the aquarium, so all the other fish get used to it. Use that same tactic in terms of getting a single department into social. It’s finding the right channel and then letting them baby-step in so they understand it.

David Harlow

Some institutions have a bias towards having a single voice, which is problematic because it’s important to reach out to individual niches that may be better known to the individual departments. It’s valuable to provide that flexibility. The challenge is to align the voice of the department with the voice of the institution overall.

“What is the most important takeaway you can give to participants of this week’s webinar, the most important short piece of advice you can offer people?”

Dan Dunlop

Your focus needs to be on the audience, on how they use social media, on the kinds of information they’re interested in receiving, and the times of day they use these platforms.