Healthcare Social Media Strategy
Social media has become the most influential, powerful, and important virtual space in the 21st century, and a well-formulated and well-executed healthcare social media strategy can change the trajectory of your online presence and your ultimate business success. When it comes to digital marketing, if you’re not using social media, it’s time to start.
Sharing your company, your brand, and your message on these digital forums can reach a significantly higher number of potential buyers or partners, potential patients, and potential employees, compared with print or television media marketing. Not only that, but social media is one of the most powerful lead-generation tools across the board.
Using Social Media for Healthcare
Using social media for healthcare is effective and offers many advantages. Here are some of the top benefits of healthcare social media strategy and marketing:
- Build Relationships: You get to tell your story, to really interact with your audience and your patients, and to connect with them on a personal level. Using social media to build relationships can build brand awareness, brand loyalty, and help you acquire and retain new patients, employees, and partnerships.
- Cost-Effective: You don’t need a huge budget to successfully market on social media. It is possible to grow on social media networks by simply being consistent and posting interesting and relevant content for your audience.
- Top-of-Mind: You stay top-of-mind if your social media followers regularly and consistently see content from you each time they browse social media.
- Understand Competitors: Easily learn about the strategies and tactics of your competitors through their social media presence. Do you see something they’re doing well that you might want to adapt and apply to your own strategy?
- Learn About Your Audience: Through social media analytical tools, you can get data on your audience’s activities and preferences. If certain content that you produce always gets a lot of engagement, consider ramping up and highlighting that content, and vice versa.
- Promote Your Services: Beyond building brand awareness, you can use social media to promote your products and services, explaining what your offerings are and why your potential patients or clients should choose your business over others.
The Importance of a Healthcare Social Media Strategy
To succeed on social media, having a solid strategy in place is key. The strategy should cover everything from determining which platforms to focus on, what content to create, when to post, and how to track your performance.
Choose Your Goals: First off, choose social media marketing goals that align to business objectives: The first step to creating a successful healthcare social media strategy is to establish your objectives and goals. What do you or your business want to achieve on social media? Social media goals should align with your overall marketing objectives.
There are so many ways social media marketing can be used, and it’s important to decide what your goals are, such as to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Share your company culture
- Share thought leadership
- Provide educational resources
- Recruit talent to job openings or patients to clinical trials
- Build engaged communities
- Sell or advertise products and services to target audiences
- Measure brand sentiment
- Provide social customer service
Get to Know Your Audience: Next, learn everything you can about your audience. Knowing who your audience is and what they want to see on social media is key. That way you can create content that they will like, comment on, and share. Social media analytics can provide a ton of valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, and how they interact with your brand on social media. These insights allow you to refine your strategy and better target your audience.
It is important to know things about your target audience like:
- Age
- Location
- Which social media platform they use most
- Average income
- Typical job title or industry
- Interests
Get to Know Your Competition: It’s integral to understand who the competition is and what they’re doing well (and not so well) so that you can guide your own strategy. Your competition can give you a good sense of what’s expected in your industry, which will help you set social media targets of your own, as well as spot opportunities for your own improvement or to add your voice to less talked-about topics.
Social listening is one way to keep an eye on your competition. You can search the competition’s company name, account handles, and other relevant keywords on social media. Find out what they’re sharing and what other people are saying about them.
By performing social listening, you can create the kind of content your followers actually want, come up with new ideas based on industry trends, improve your patient experience by interacting directly with followers, and continuously shift your strategy to fit the current need.
- Identify pain points.
- Choose strategic keywords and topics to monitor.
- Use it to improve your patient feedback process.
- Generate leads by following recommendation posts in your industry.
Do a Social Media Audit: If you’re already using social media, take stock of your current efforts, assess your progress, and think about ways to improve. Your analytics and engagement rates indicate the type of content that is the most and least popular to your audience, what time of day your posts do best, what frequency of posting is most successful, and more. Make sure to really use this available data to your advantage and learn from it.
An audit of current platforms can involve questions like:
- What’s working, and what’s not?
- Who is engaging with you?
- Which networks does your target audience use?
- How does your social media presence compare to the competition?
Set Up Accounts and Improve Profiles: As you decide which social networks to use, you will also need to define your strategy for each. Become really familiar with each platform, its primary audience, its ideal content format, and then determine which platforms to invest your time and focus on based on the social media goals you outlined.
It is not necessary to have a social media presence on every single platform. It is better to focus on doing a great job on fewer accounts than to use all of them with less effort.
When creating social media profiles, make sure to:
- Fill out all profile fields.
- Include keywords people would use to search for your business.
- Use consistent branding (logos, colors, images, etc.) across networks so your profiles are easily recognizable.
- Use high-quality images that follow the recommended dimensions for each network (a quick Google search will tell you recommended dimensions by site).
Find Inspiration: While it’s important that your brand be unique, you can still draw inspiration from other businesses that do great on social media, such as award-winning accounts and campaigns or even your personal favorite brands. The best accounts have a consistent voice, tone, and style. This lets people know what to expect from the feed and consistency builds your brand awareness and recognition.
If you have existing social channels, you could also ask your followers what they want from you. Just make sure that you follow through and deliver what they ask for. Consider what your target audience is talking about online and what you can learn about their wants and needs.
Create a Social Media Content Calendar: Your social media content calendar lists the dates and times at which you will publish types of content on each channel. It’s the perfect place to plan all of your social media activities—from images, link sharing, and re-shares of user-generated content to blog posts and videos. It includes both your day-to-day posting and content for social media campaigns.
A content calendar also ensures your posts are spaced out appropriately and published at the best times to post.
Make sure your content strategy and calendar reflect the mission statement you’ve assigned to each social profile, so that everything you post is working to support your business goals. Based on your goals, divide your posts into categories, and then create content for each category, such as:
- Content to drive traffic to your website
- Content shared from other sources
- Content to support lead-generation (scheduled appointments, newsletter sign-ups, ebook downloads, etc.)
- Content to share your company culture
- Content to share job listings
Create Compelling Content: Keep your content aligned with the purpose of each network and then generate content that is suited to the network and the purpose you’ve set out for that network in your goals. For example, you wouldn’t want to waste time posting brand awareness videos on Twitter if you’ve designated that channel for primarily patient support. And you wouldn’t want to post super polished corporate video ads to TikTok, as users expect to see short, unpolished videos on that platform.
It might take some testing over time to figure out which type of content works best on which type of network, so prepare to update and pivot your strategy as your analytics provide relevant feedback.
Take Advantage of Micro-Content: In content creation and planning, take advantage of existing assets or content you may already have and then repurpose it across platforms. For example, parsing long-form content (such as ebooks or blog posts) into social micro-content by taking small chunks and having endless social posts as a result. Similarly, consider segmenting a long video from your company’s website into sections for multiple social posts.
Using micro-content saves time when creating content and also ensures that the assets you have are being used to their full potential.
Embed Branding Elements Across all Platforms: Remember to keep branding, voice, and tone consistent and cohesive across social platforms, emails, videos, and your website so that your content is visibly tied to your company as a whole. This creative cohesion helps viewers to recognize your brand (whether that is colors, font, logo, etc.), which is a key step to increasing brand awareness and recognition when you pop up in their feed.
Track Performance and Adjust Your Healthcare Social Media Strategy Accordingly: As you start to implement your social media strategy and track your results, you may find that some strategies don’t work as well as you’d anticipated, while others are working even better than expected.
Once the analytics data starts coming in, use it to re-evaluate your strategy regularly. You can also use this information to test different posts, social marketing campaigns, and strategies against one another. Constant testing allows you to understand what works and what doesn’t, so you can refine your social media marketing strategy in real time.
You’ll want to check the performance of all your channels at least once a week and get to know the basics of social media reporting so you can track your growth over time. Surveys can also be a great way to find out how well your social media strategy is working. Ask your patients, followers, email list, and website visitors whether you’re meeting their needs and expectations, and what they’d like to see more of. Then make sure to deliver on what they tell you.
Our Proven Track Record with Healthcare Strategy
At emagineHealth, our social media strategists have extensive knowledge and experience creating and executing successful, data-informed, and customized social media strategies for the healthcare industry.
Drastically increased impressions, engagement, and post link clicks across all social platforms, as well as increased followers and audience growth are just a handful of the results our clients have seen.
Our strategists use tactics such as leveraging CEO influencers, elevating leadership, using platform feature variety, and boosting organic content to enhance social presence and accomplish social strategy goals.
We Simplify Social Media for Healthcare
Specializing in healthcare, biopharma, and life sciences and equipped with the knowledge and expertise to use social media to its fullest potential, we streamline your healthcare social media strategy. Our strategists implement a well-formulated and well-executed healthcare social media strategy that can change the trajectory of your online presence and your ultimate business success.
Working with emagineHealth, you will have a dedicated social media strategist who will:
- Audit Your Social Media Profiles
- Find out if your page is optimized
- Are you using the key features of the platform?
- What content is working? What isn’t working?
- What does your audience look like right now?
- Are you leveraging best practices (think hashtags, mentions, etc.)?
- Analyze Competitors
- What are their growth patterns?
- What content is working for them?
- Why do we think that content is working?
- Develop a Cohesive, Holistic Strategy
- Page optimization
- Content topics
- Posting frequency
- Content types
- Engagement
- Influencer strategies
- Community management
- Create Content
- Copywriting (short and long-form)
- Video
- Animations
- Infographics and other graphics
- Optimize Paid Social
- Define the objectives that matter most to your business
- Use LinkedIn’s targeting tools to reach the right audience (specific companies, job titles, work experience, etc.)
- Create and manage your ad campaigns
- Assess your campaign analytics to evaluate effectiveness
- Measure Success with Custom Reports
- Define KPIs
- Metrics that mean the most to your brand, based on established goals
- In-depth monthly reporting
- Review quarterly to determine audience behavior, what’s working and where we need to improve
Strengthen Your Healthcare Social Media Strategy
Social media channels have become a major source of healthcare and pharma news and information in today’s digital economy. But that’s not all. Social media presence is also a vital factor in search rankings and digital marketing.
As social media usage continues to grow exponentially, knowing how to market on social media is becoming more crucial in reaching your target demographics and creating brand awareness.
We offer social media marketing strategy, social channel management, promoted & paid social management, social measurement & analytics, and community management.
For a proven strategy to get your message across, reach your target audiences, and accomplish your social media goals, reach out now. Let’s get started.
Social Media for Healthcare & Biopharma
emagineHealth outlines the critical steps you can take now to show up on social media with a proven strategy to get your message across, reach your target audiences, and accomplish your social media goals.