The Critical Role of Social Media Monitoring in the Healthcare Industry
Ioannis Kopanakis
Co-Founder @Mentionlytics.com | Professor Hellenic Mediterranean Univ. | Scientific Director @HMU Innovation Hub
Today?73% of patients ?search online for any medical information, which proves the importance of social media for the Healthcare Industry.
Around?70% of US healthcare industry organizations , including medical centers and hospitals, use social media and blogs?for organizational promotion. Whether it is professional networking, professional education, patient care, or public health programs, social media is everywhere when we talk about the healthcare sector.
Source:?Breast Advocate Twitter
Social media has also touched some of the areas which were difficult to access for the common people – The Operating Room.?Surgeons from the Henry Ford Hospital tweeted the live procedure ?from an operating room to which all doctors, medical students, and nurses followed. They got short updates from the operating room on kidney surgery to remove the cancerous tumor.
Using social media could be a great marketing tactic to raise excitement and public awareness about medical organizations. This way, health organizations can attract new patients and recruit top medical staff. Let’s discuss in detail:
Why?Does the Healthcare Industry Need Social Media?Monitoring Tools?
Social media has become one of the best ways to stay connected, communicate, and promote services. Social networking sites have evolved with time and became a prevalent way to reach out to consumers and medical professionals. It has helped the healthcare sector to be able to move away from traditional advertising and use the internet to its best advantage.
Modern-day consumers use social media to know about doctors, specialists, and hospitals and make informed decisions. Healthcare professionals can leverage this opportunity to connect with patients. They can garner attention by sharing updates on new technology with the intent to educate their patients as well as other medical staff.
Now, let’s discuss how social media monitoring can help the healthcare sector to grow:
1) To Build Marketing Strategies?
Healthcare professionals will find a wealth of data on social media where patients share experiences with healthcare workers. They can embrace this user-generated data to connect with potential patients and grow awareness about their organization and services. Media monitoring can also be used to provide information about any of these essential categories:
2) To Quantify the Impact?
By quantifying, we mean measuring the impact of social media on your healthcare organization. Using social media analytics, you can categorize data and understand what works for your organization and whatnot. Begin with calculating the ROI in terms of engagement, revenue, traffic, or queries whatever your goals are. This way, you can manage your organization’s reputation and measure the social media value you generate through your health and wellness campaigns.
3) To Find Meaningful Market Insights?
You can become a data-savvy professional for your healthcare organization based on the insights you get from social media monitoring, which helps you create reports with different variables. The reports may include a performance overview of your organization, a metric breakdown chart, a list of wellness stories you shared, and much more. Moreover, you will get to know the engagement rate, daily average impressions, likes per post, and total mentions.
After evaluating all these, you can add context to this information and analyze the trends. You can also find what made some posts top the charts for a particular month. This way, you can use the enormous data across the web to improve social media performance and gain more patients.
4) To Maintain Transparency and Active Communication?
Social media channels allow two-way public communication between patients, healthcare organizations, and other third parties. You will find a vast network of influencers, thought-leaders, patients, and organizations that discuss the healthcare sector’s loopholes and ways to improve. Hence, with open communication the healthcare sector has an opportunity to enhance support for patients and other consumers, which may include introducing new doctors in practice, answering queries like hours of operation, and providing information on pre and post-operative care.
The insights you get can also be used across all departments to distribute evidence-based information to the patients. It will also help counter inaccurate material about treatments and drugs on the internet to improve your healthcare organization’s credibility.
5) To Foster Discussions with Stakeholders
People who mention your healthcare services are essential, but people who initiate the entire conversation around a subject are also important. They can provide you with useful insights, help you understand people’s attitudes towards the organization, and facilitate more target messaging to know how your services are being portrayed and whether people are interested in your services or not.
Supposedly, you have tweeted about HIV treatment. There would be people who will mention your brand and discuss various aspects of the disease. Diving deeper, you will find out what people know about HIV treatment and what they expect more. You will also come across different audiences discussing the same topic on various platforms, which could be your potential patients.
7) To Improve Your Services
Customer services are an integral part of the healthcare industry, where customers quickly approach the organization to seek support. You can use social media monitoring to streamline customer service management. As your brand is easily accessible on social media, people can come to you directly, and it doesn’t matter whether they want to complain or give feedback.
With a social media analytics tool, you can formulate an excellent customer service system where various customer service professionals will handle online queries, and chatbots will attend website visitors. Offering real-time solutions to customers help strengthen the bond and turn them into loyal customers for a lifetime.
8) To Measure Your Efforts
Social media analytics ?is the best way to keep a stock of your audience’s responses in an organized manner. It will help you identify whether you are reaching the right audience or not. You will also learn about the sources of accessible content that assist you in designing your social media campaigns.
Social media monitoring will help uncover critical insights about your marketing activities and identify the weak areas that need improvement. It will ultimately help you reach your goals and business objectives.
领英推荐
9) To Create Patient-centric Social Media Campaigns
Healthcare brands can leverage social media to engage their audience through different social media campaigns. They can use particular hashtags, online contests, and quizzes to trigger interest among the audience and increase brand awareness.
Healthcare organizations can showcase patient stories that evoke emotions of empathy. The best example for such campaigns is from the?New York-Presbyterian Hospital , where they posted the story of Michael Kiernan. It triggered emotions and sparked many responses.
Source:?Penji.co
Such ad campaigns showcasing patient stories build trust in the audience as they empathize with the way nurses and doctors helped their patients in times of dire need.
10) To Build Your Healthcare Brand and Relationships Online
Online reputation management is an integral part of social media monitoring, which is used to spread positive word of mouth about the healthcare brand. Here patient testimonials, positive reviews, and feedback play a significant role in building your brand. Patients tend to trust your brand, which helps generate new leads and maintain a long-lasting relationship with them. As your image improves over social media, your happy customers will talk about you more, which will somehow expand your customer base.
Source:?Penji.co
Here PillPack shared a social media campaign where it shared its article published by?Forbes . It turned out to be extremely useful and provided a piece of evidence depicting people’s dependability on them. It enhanced the brand’s credibility as it brought one of the most reliable sources, Forbes, to testify their reliability.
11) To Get Real-time Updates and Understand Competition
Administrators in big healthcare organizations keep close tabs on their competitors through social media. They keep some critical factors in mind to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns their competitors are using. These factors could include community involvement, customer pain points, and service lines their competitors have introduced. Moreover, customer feedback and usage of new technologies and procedures and how they impact the lives of patients are also considered.
Note:?If you are ramping up your social media strategy, it is advisable to note different social media channels where your competitors are active to eliminate any guesswork. Use a marketing campaign to create a sense of urgency as?heathcare.gov ?did utilize many trigger words such as?last chance,?last day, and?don’t miss out. This way, they were successful at getting a fast response on people’s part.
Social Media Monitoring KPIs that Healthcare Industry Should Track
You cannot measure your efforts unless you know the KPIs that give you a clear picture of what you need to do to improve your brand image on social media. KPIs are the values that measure your marketing campaign’s performance and its impact on the brand image. You will find numerous KPIs to track, expand your brand’s commercial reach, increase your engagement, boost revenue, and improve your ROI.
The common KPIs which marketing agencies use to track your performance are:
Leads?– Assess the number of meaningful leads you are generating through your social media campaigns.
Reach?– How many customers have reached your posts on social media? It is an important question to understand the intensity of your posts. The number of a few fans and subscribers can change the game. It will help if you keep an eye on how many fans you have gained and how many you lost at a particular time and understand which content is performing the best.
Engagement?– Engagement is another important metric that focuses on how many people your content successfully interacted with and engaged.
Also, how many ways have you tried engaging your customers? Here clicks on the link is a vital metric to understand what type of content is attracting clicks. Also, average shares per post can tell you about the audience’s reception of your content and help you create campaigns that strike a positive chord with your audience.
Conversions?– Lastly, conversions hold the total weight, which assesses how many people have converted through your social media posts and have become regular customers. More conversions depict that your campaign can nurture leads and perfectly resonates with what people want. Some of the standard conversion metrics to evaluate at each touchpoint are:
Also, ROI is the holy grail of all social media KPIs that depicts the value of your marketing efforts and social media campaigns. Here you will get to know the unnecessary activities costing you a lot and eating up your funds to focus on activities that need your time and are worth investing in.
How Mentionlytics?Can Help?
When you belong to the healthcare industry, it could be challenging to handle and understand tons of information uploaded on social media. Hence, we recommend using social media monitoring tools to track a patient’s behavior, preferences, sentiments, competitors, and engagement.
We know tracking key social media metrics could be a challenge for you, so it’s best to invest in social media monitoring tools like?Mentionlytics , as it will help you on an enormous level. With Mentionlytics, you can enjoy a stress-free time as it offers numerous features that are incredibly beneficial for you, such as:
Apart from this, you can also join in forum discussions, comments, and blog posts to spread awareness about your brand with Mentionlytics.
So, what are you thinking about??Get started with a free version here!