Healthcare Practice Social Media PR Tools?

Public relations for physician practices and other healthcare organizations is no longer just press releases and traditional media interviews. Modern PR includes posting content on social media, a company's website and more..

It may seem challenging to reach new patients and interact online given all the regulations the healthcare industry faces. Yet, it’s not impossible. In fact, in 2017 there’s a lot that healthcare marketers can do to reach a wider audience, connect with patients, and drive traffic and impressions.

Related Article: YOUR Medical Practice Social Media?

Here’s what you need to know to about healthcare PR in 2017 and how to make it work for you.

It’s Time to Harness Influencers

Businesses have been using influencer marketing for years to reach broader audiences and drive brand impressions and authority. A 2014 Influencer Marketing Benchmarks Report from Burst Media found that it even provides significant ROI: On average, marketers made $6.85 in earned media value for every $1 of paid media, as reported by AdWeek.

Within the same study, participants used the three following influencer-marketing tools:

• Sponsored blog posts
• Social syndication and branded content distribution
• Influencers and influential content

The goal is to use these tools and tactics to expand your reach within influencer networks on social media, blogs, and paid media. The first step, however, is determining who your ideal patient or audience is — that will dictate who your influencers are.

Related Article: Influencing The Social Media Influencers?

For example, a brain surgeon may be highly influential in the neurosurgery world, but in pediatric medicine, he’s likely not well known.

Use tools like BuzzSumo, FollowerWonk and Klout to make the process of finding your influencers easier and faster. Next, start a list that includes the influencer’s name, area of influence, opportunity (sponsored blog post, syndicated content) along with relevant links, such as their website and social media channels.

Now all that’s left is to reach out, develop a partnership, and do the work. Be sure to track metrics to see which influencers are more effective for your goals, whether you want to drive traffic or new patient sign ups.

You Can Say A Lot on Social Media - And Should

Social media can be a scary place for practice marketers unused to the medium and who are wary of violating regulations. However, it’s a place you need to be considering that social media and community management are the strongest drivers of growth in the digital and social arena, according to 55.3 percent of digital agency leaders polled.

Related Article: The Social Media Health Care System?

The key is to know how to use social media most effectively. The following ideas are a great place to start.

Authenticity is everything in our world of nonstop advertising. Use social media to communicate the “why” of your practice and the various people within it. Feature one doctor a month with an image-based post that includes a quote about their “why.”

Pair this with a blog post, which can be shared as well. After being indexed by Google, it will start ranking in search, giving new patients another way of finding your website when searching online.

Make Your Office Relatable

A trip to a doctor’s office can be a nerve-wracking experience for many people, whether they suffer from anxiety or are worried about a health issue. Make it feel more comfortable by taking your social media followers “behind the scenes”. Share photos of doctors talking with one another in the office or co-workers having fun at an office event. You can even share videos of funny things happening around the office.

Note: To be compliant with HIPPA, avoid posting photos or videos of someone who has not consented to be in it; this goes for people in the background as well.

Related Article: Social Media Marketing Best Practices?

Share Both the Risks and Benefits

When promoting a specific type of drug or product, the FDA requires that you share equally about the risks and benefits. That doesn’t mean you can highlight the benefits in large font and push the risks to the bottom of your post in smaller font; the FDA evaluates the entire social post, according to the report What FDA Regulations Mean for Healthcare PR Professionals:

"The FDA considers not only words or statements, but also designs and images, format, and placement and size of the text. So while individual statements may be accurate and not misleading, you must consider the impact of the piece as a whole before determining whether it meets this FDA standard."

Patient Stories

A PWC survey found 29 percent of people are looking at other patients’ experiences with their disease on social media. Use this to your advantage by sharing interesting stories about patients with unique health experiences (with their permission). This is an opportunity to show that your business can handle a variety of health concerns while educating and attracting patients. Always have the patient sign a waiver in cases like this, so you have proof of their consent.

Related Article: Becoming A Social Media Patient Influencer?

The Need For Content

Content is a broad word that refers to assets of all kind, including:

• Text-based (i.e., blog posts, eBooks, white papers, articles)
• Photos
• Graphics
• Videos
• Online tools, such as a BMI calculator or arthritis symptoms quiz.

Harnessing this content to drive engagement, traffic and search engine optimization is critical in 2017. Not only is it a valuable asset for influencer marketing, but it’s also a general marketing tool that can be used to reach a wide range of goals. These goals should be at the forefront of the creation process to ensure you get the most from your efforts.

For example, if your goal is to drive more new patient sign ups, you may create a piece of content that would be most appealing to your target patient. If your goal is to drive backlinks, the content may matter less than the format; engaging graphics, for example, tend to drive more links than a regular blog post.

Once the content is created, it’s time to distribute, whether that’s through a paid ad, your influencer network, or organic social posting.

Related Article: YOUR Content Distribution Machine?

Here's An Example:

A pediatric healthcare office has a goal of adding 10 new patients in the next six months. To do so, they have to reach their target audience, which isn’t kids, but their parents. In this case, it creates a downloadable checklist of important doctor appointment dates from birth to age 10, which parents can use as a reference.

The office “gates” the download —those interested have to provide contact details such as name and email to get it. Finally, they create a highly targeted Facebook ad to drive clicks to this content. The office then follows up with anyone who downloaded the content to find out if they’re interested in setting up an initial appointment.

Guest Authored By Holly Rollins. Holly has more than 20 years experience in marketing and public relations. As 10x digital President, she has created successful content marketing and digital marketing/PR for diverse sectors, with an emphasis on healthcare. She and her seasoned team know the foundation for digital marketing and the perfect balance for integrating these best practices with overall marketing to make companies STAND OUT. Follow Holly on Twitter.

Related Article: A Social Media Guide For YOUR Start-Up?

Despite regulations, the healthcare industry has a lot of opportunities to take advantage of modern PR in 2017.

Use these ideas to jumpstart your efforts, and slowly you’ll figure out what works best for your audience and practice..

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Becoming A Social Media Patient Influencer?

Barby Ingle can tell you all about living with chronic pain. Fifteen years ago, while driving to work at Washington State University, a van smashed into her car, twisting her 90-pound frame in her seat..

A doctor diagnosed whiplash, put her in a neck brace, and sent her home. But the pain got worse, spreading across her body like lighter fluid set aflame. No fewer than 43 doctors tried to find the source of her agony.

It was seven years before a specialist identified the problem: reflex sympathetic dystrophy, sometimes called complex regional pain syndrome. Infusion treatments got her out of a wheelchair and back on her feet. Ingle started sharing her story, first with a blog, and then a book, and then on social media. 

Today, she has more than 26,000 Twitter followers who seek her guidance in dealing with insurance, living with chronic pain, and, perhaps most importantly, maintaining hope. To her surprise, she is something of an online celebrity, or perhaps more accurately, a patient influencer.

Related Article: Your Social Media Pharmacist?

Just as Snapchat and Instagram and YouTube have influencers, so too does medicine..

Chronic diseases occupy an online world of memes, hashtags (#hospitalglam), and people who provide information and insights to communities that too often feel they have no voice. A growing number of companies are hiring these patient influencers to reach, and understand, these folks. And, of course, sell them stuff.

Related Article: Is Social Media Making YOU Money?

Last month, the Boston company Wego Health launched a web-based platform that introduces pharmaceutical firms, medical device manufacturers, hospitals, and insurers to people like Ingles. Those firms, in turn, pay influencers for access to their experiences, expertise, and followers. Ingles started working with Wego's beta pilot last year and takes a few jobs a month. Wego is something of a bulletin board where companies post their needs - someone to recruit 50 people for a survey, for example, or represent the patient perspective on a panel and influencers vetted by Wego apply. All the details are left to the parties involved; Wego only coordinates the introductions.

Social reach is the chief currency on Wego’s Health Experts platform; patient influencers are evaluated on the size of their Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat followings as well as blog subscribers and impressions. The company says there aren’t any magic numbers for people to qualify - especially for rare diseases where the communities are small. Rather, it’s all about the relative size of someone’s digital footprint. So far, the company has invited 175 influencers to join its league of experts, and they represent almost as many diseases' from irritable bowel syndrome to lupus and lung cancer.

Related Article: A Social Media Travel Influencer?

In a sense, the company is democratizing the lucrative business of health care by bringing in people who actually live with the disease. Forty-five companies have profiles on the site: health start-ups, marketing research companies, and brand strategy agencies with pharmaceutical clients that will hire the influencers. But that model blurs the lines between sponsored content and real life, by leveraging the trust these influencers have built over the years with their unique communities. And when it comes to health care, the stakes are a lot higher than choosing the right juice cleanse.

Patient as Promoter

Some people on the platform put their personal disease journeys front and center of their social media channels - posting hospital gown selfies and live tweeting colon imaging procedures. But other patient influencers work more behind the scenes. Jodi Dwyer, an oncology social worker from Boston who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2008, has recruited other MS patients for surveys, sat in on focus groups, and spoken on panels hosted by various pharmaceutical manufacturers.

Related Article: A Social Media Influencer Mini-Economy?

She says she’s often surprised by the interest these firms show in what her community has to say, and how they respond to it. For example, one company stopped airing a commercial that showed an MS patient climbing a mountain, riding a bike, and swimming in a pond all in the same day. “That just didn’t match up,” she says. “But they were able to take the feedback that it didn’t feel authentic to us.”

Dwyer says no one has ever asked her what medications she takes, nor has she been asked to promote a product she does not support or find effective. And with her full-time job at a hospital helping cancer patients cope with their diagnoses, she has good reasons to remain objective. But some doctors and researchers worry that financial incentives and easy access to lucrative consulting opportunities could harm patients as much as help them.

“In some sense, influencers in health care aren't any different from those in fashion or food blogging; they all have conflicts of interest,” says Jeff Belkora, a health policy researcher and director of the Patient Support Corps at the University of California, San Francisco. He thinks patient experts can provide valuable insights about, say, what it’s like to experience different treatment options. But transparency is important, and patients must carefully consider options without blindly following someone they saw on Instagram. “This is your health we’re talking about,” he says. “This is your life. You’ve got to roll up your sleeves and tackle it like a project.”

Related Article: A Big Brand Influencer Army?

Wego does have some checks and balances in place. For the 100,000 members of their health network (a group that primarily participates in research), Wego employs an AI system to passively monitor people’s content. If they use the words “aloe vera” too many times in close proximity to “cure” and “breast cancer,” for instance, they might not be invited to the next volunteer opportunity. For the 175 patient influencers on the Health Expert platform, the company lets the marketplace do that work for them; its clients rate each contractor after every gig and that score stands in as a measure of credibility.

But it's hard to know for sure. Joy L. Lee, a health services researcher at Indiana University School of Medicine and the Regenstrief Institute, says people must approach influencers with a healthy dose of skepticism because no one has systematically evaluated the legitimacy of their claims. “It is a little bit apples and oranges,” she says, pointing out that patients tend to share emotional support as opposed to technical support online. “But I hope that doctors work out their fears of social media, because that’s where the patients are and they have a responsibility to be there with them.”

It’s tricky, right? Social media provides people with a virtual community in which to voice concerns, seek advice, and overcome the stigma that too often accompanies a chronic disease. The risk lies in corporate interests undermining the integrity and efficacy of these networks to serve their own ends. On the other, other hand, the internet created professional miniature food-makers and frisbee trick shot throwers; why not professional patients?

Guest Authored By Megan Molteni. Megan is Science Writer for Wired. Follow Megan on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Influencer Alliance?

"Social media provides people with a virtual community in which to voice concerns, seek advice, and overcome the stigma that too often accompanies a chronic disease. 

The risk lies in corporate interests undermining the integrity and efficacy of these networks to serve their own ends.

On the other, other hand, the internet created professional miniature food-makers and frisbee trick shot throwers; why not professional patients??"

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at GetMoreHere.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Follow Me Yonder..