Key takeaways:
- Match platforms to skills: Assess healthcare professionals’ social media abilities and recommend platforms accordingly for efficient content creation.
- Partner strategically: Collaborate with influencers and agencies aligned with hospital goals to enhance brand visibility and engagement, ensuring authenticity in content creation.
- Educate on best practices: Educate healthcare professionals on social media policies to ensure alignment with institutional guidelines, emphasizing professionalism and clarity in medical information sharing.
When navigating large teams and overworked physicians, service lines, and health professionals, obtaining quality social media content is a constant hurdle.
Yet creating engaging content not only connects healthcare professionals with patients, it also helps highlight your hospital’s brand. How can hospital social media leaders minimize the headaches associated with content sourcing?
The American Osteopathic Association (AOA) underlined the necessity of delivering quality social media content in a recent study that found 54% of millennials would like to be friends with their healthcare providers on social media, and 65% of millennials said they would contact a physician about a health concern through social media.
Given these statistics, and what you’ve experienced running a hospital social media program, how can you work internally to streamline your content sourcing process?
As a social media leader, you’re expected to work across many of your hospital’s stakeholders and eliminate any barriers that come with sourcing content. Here are some tips to help your hospital generate “quality” content.
1. Choose Platforms That Match Your Healthcare Professionals’ Skills
Your hospital’s healthcare professionals likely do not know the ins and outs of all the emerging social media platforms and capabilities — so it can help to focus their energy on familiar platforms they use on personal time.
In fact, Dr. Austin Chiang, Chief Medical Officer for Gastrointestinal at Medtronic and former Chief Medical Social Media Officer at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals, explained to Op-Med that clinicians should choose the platform that best matches their skill set.
“My main goal is to educate and help people not only understand medical news and concepts, but also how to interpret medical information and encourage everyone to dig deeper beyond the headlines,” Dr. Chiang said in the Op-Med article.
My main goal is to educate and help people not only understand medical news and concepts, but also how to interpret medical information and encourage everyone to dig deeper beyond the headlines.
Dr. Austin Chiang, Chief Medical Officer for Gastrointestinal at Medtronic and former Chief Medical Social Media Officer at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals
Given how busy a physician’s schedule can be, first get an understanding of their social media skill set before making a platform recommendation.
For healthcare professionals with limited time for content creation — consider Twitter for short missives. Those with more adept social media skills might be able to generate short, engaging videos on platforms like TikTok that have seen big increases in short-form medical information sharing.
Dr. Danielle Jones, also known as Mama Doctor Jones, a board-certified Ob/Gyn, utilizes YouTube to reach younger audiences through video. In the Op-Med article, she described her YouTube videos as, “a great exercise in expanding my creativity and really leaning into edutainment.”
2. Leverage Agencies and Influencers
Outsourcing content creation to agencies and influencers can be a key step in expanding your brand awareness. Influencers, musicians, radio personalities, and athletes can exponentially increase your engagement on content and grow your following.
While it may cost more for your team to outsource the creation of content, it can also be an effective strategy for improving your brand reputation and meeting desired metrics. In fact, Burst Media reported in a survey that influencer campaigns result in $6.85 in earned media value for every $1 of paid media.
Hospital social media leaders can leverage people with large followings to provide healthcare information and highlight how their hospitals are helping patients. However it’s important to ensure any influencers you choose to pursue align with your hospital’s healthcare goals.
Bloom Creative reported how working with individuals and agencies that share your goals can result in successful influencer marketing campaigns.
“If former patients are sharing positive experiences on blogs and social media accounts, it’s easier to develop influencer relationships organically,” their article stated. They also shared how social listening tools can help you outsource content and find the top influencers for specific hashtags, keywords, and subjects.
But be aware, don’t pursue influencers just because of their popularity. As Bloom Creative noted, “You have to take into account how well their audience fits with the message you want to convey.”
3. EducateHealthcare Professionals on Social Media Best Practices
While it’s helpful to have your physicians generate content for your social media accounts, it can also cause strategy misalignment if content creators are unaware of your policies. It’s best to take time to educate healthcare professionals on best practices for content creation on social media.
Make sure you know your institution’s social media policies.
Dr. Marjorie Stiegler, Executive Medical Director and Senior Medical Lead for US Medical Affairs at GSK
Dr. Marjorie Stiegler, Executive Medical Director and Senior Medical Lead for US Medical Affairs at GSK, shared some best practices for physicians to follow when posting on social media.
“Make sure you know your institution’s social media policies,” Dr. Stiegler said on her blog. She also explained more tips on how to avoid trouble on social media as a healthcare leader including keeping content professional and educational, making sure to make it clear that what you say is intended as medical information and not specific recommendations.
You can also learn directly from your peers how to best educate and inform hospital staff members on appropriate and safe social media use. Members of SocialMedia.org Health, who all lead social media at major hospitals, recently benchmarked their social media policies for hospital staff, sharing examples with one another.
Leaders discussed their internal social media policy guidelines, which included the “do’s” and “don’ts” of having an online presence, how to create and manage accounts, and how to work within marketing and communications content approval processes.
4. Learn How Your Peers are Sourcing Content at Major Hospitals
Whether you create content yourself, outsource to an agency, or rely on your internal network of providers and employees, sourcing quality content can be an endless struggle for hospital social media — but it doesn’t have to be.
SocialMedia.org Health members met on August 9th, at 1 PM ET, to discuss how they’re eliminating the headaches and hurdles of content sourcing. They benchmarked how they engage overworked physicians, caregivers, and service lines in a virtual environment.
If you’re the head of social media at a major hospital, you can learn how your peers are educating healthcare professionals and hospital staff on how to create “good” content, along with the benefits and drawbacks of outsourcing content.
