Five Reasons to Automate Your Hospital's Social Media and Web Marketing Strategy

Most hospitals today have social media accounts on major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. While many actively post on their accounts, most are only reactively posting top down news, rather than implementing a pre-planned automated posting strategy.

In this article we will explore five reasons hospitals should enhance their social media and web marketing efforts by using pre-planned automated web marketing and social media campaigns.

1. Strategic feeds target specific consumers and deliver better results

In most organizations, marketing professionals are required to post organizational news items on their social media accounts. An upcoming hospital fundraising gala, or a physicians golf tournament are often found on hospital social media feeds.

In the same feed, you may also find stories about health awareness months, or new services being offered at the hospital. While these news items are important to the administrative leadership of the institution, consumers who have subscribed to this type of mixed feed may not connect with this type of mixed information.

Social media and web marketing efforts deliver significantly better results when they target consumers with specific health needs by service line.

2. Automated service line feeds drive more customer engagement

Consumers often have specific interests that are not well served by a general hospital announcements feed. Rather, every hospital should set up specific social media accounts and pages for each of the major service lines they offer to the public.

For instance, hospitals usually have an active women’s services program. Birthing is generally a large component of the area. Therefore a hospital should communicate separately to expectant mothers on a separate feed.

The key to effective social media, is breaking customers out into their separate health interests and then communicating and engaging with those customers regularly. People value and appreciate target information that focuses on their specific health needs.

3. Pre-Planned feeds systematically and continuously promote your services

Even if your institution has separate feeds for each of your service lines, you need to evaluate whether the feeds are simply being updated when there is top down news. If so, the feeds are not meeting their full potential. Service line feeds need to be pre-planned, so that the feed continuously drips information to potential or existing customers.

Social media feeds that focus on service lines should always be pre-planned and automated. The feeds should do more than simply display top down news coming from the service line or hospital administration. Rather, each feed should be crafted using a pre-planned strategy of effective and emotive posts. This type of strategy is a project level endeavor and should be completely independent from top down organizational news feeds.

4. Targeted service line feeds are more valuable to your customers

General hospital news and announcements are not usually compelling to consumers, While the news and events of a hospital are important to leadership, the average consumer views this information as largely irrelevant to their lives.

In contrast, someone with an ongoing heart condition will strongly engage with a cardiac services social media feed from their local hospital. That same individual probably is not interested in an upcoming hospital fundraiser or golf tournament.

As consumers we are very interested in our own private health conditions. That is why it is essential to create feeds that focus on patient and customer conditions rather than on generic hospital news. Creating social media feeds that stay focused on the interests of patients with specific health needs will always be more effective than feeds that lose focus by trying to communicate on a broad range of topics.

5. Hospitals that dedicate resources to automated and pre-planned feeds grow faster

Creating a pre-planned automated social media communication strategy requires a dedicated project manager or the assistance of a healthcare marketing services firm. The strategy should not be added to the plate of a local hospital marketing manager, but rather should be implemented and managed by either a vendor or a dedicated staff member at the hospital.

If you hospital needs assistance in creating a preplanned and automated social media strategy, we can help.

Also for more information on hospital marketing, read our related article "Five Ways Hospitals Can Increase Sales."