Start Off Summer with a Healthy Social Media Marketing Strategy

Even though nearly 60 percent of patients decide where to get treatment based on a healthcare provider’s social media information, many doctors and similar medical professionals still have little or no social media presence. And many other healthcare providers simply don’t view social media marketing (SMM) is being all that important for them. If your social media efforts were on life support for most of this year, use the changing season as an incentive to put together a better and more productive healthcare-related social media strategy for the second half of the year.

Present Relevant, ‘Share-Worthy’ Content

Dive into your social media stats to see how the content you produced and distributed performed over the past year. If people haven’t been actively viewing and sharing what you’ve been posting, consider it as sign you need to switch things up. Healthcare content that usually sparks engagement and encourages people to share it with others in their social circle includes:

• Quick, relevant tips or facts
• Content with a local focus
• Links to in-depth articles on topical healthcare issues
• Fun or thought-provoking questions designed to inspire comments and start conversations

Explore Your Options with Viral Marketing

The purpose of social media is to build relationships, not just present content and hope it resonates well with current and potential patients. One of the newer trends with SMM is what’s termed viral marketing, which simply refers to any social campaign that quickly attracts the attention of a wide audience. If you didn’t tap into this trend yet make it work for you by targeting health-related causes you know many people will likely care about. Next, reach out to a partner, like a local charity, with similar goals to work together to promote that cause via social media.

Get Creative with Your Social Engagement Efforts

Not all of your social efforts have to be about warning people of the dangers of things that could negatively impact their health. Think out of the box to attract the attention of your desired audience. For example, one healthcare company had tremendous success with a campaign that encouraged followers to make at least one healthy change each month and document it on social media. A related tactic is to use a branded hashtag to make it easier for content submitted by followers to be discovered and shared.

Finally, how much of your available marketing resources did you actually set aside for social media this year? If you invested very little because you didn’t think social media was important for your practice, you may have stumbled across the reason for your lack of success with online social engagement. You don’t have to blow your entire budget for social media marketing However, you’ll want to set aside sufficient resources so you can actually achieve the goals you have for social media going forward.