How to Use Social Media for Healthcare: Tips for Facilities
Social media is a valuable medium for healthcare facilities to stay connected with industry stakeholders and build a reputation with the public. However, these platforms can be complex, and you may need help sorting through best practices to effectively engage with diverse, online audiences.
We’ll explore the benefits of using social media for healthcare, tips for effective implementation, and the best platforms to implement various social media strategies. Examples and ideas you find here can be used as inspiration as you refine your organization’s social media goals.
Benefits of Using Social Media for Healthcare
Enacting a social media strategy is a great way for your facility to engage with the healthcare community as a whole. Beyond attracting more attention to your business, it will help you stay connected with individuals across the industry, such as patients, providers, and other healthcare organizations. Also, social media accounts are free for businesses, so the startup costs are minimal. More specific benefits of using social media include the following:
- Real connections: Social media platforms provide communication opportunities between you and your healthcare community, which allows you to gain valuable feedback directly from patients, employees, and stakeholders. Creating an online presence can shed light on the human element of your facility.
- Increased exposure: You’ll gain brand awareness if your organization is found on social media. This increased viewership can help you become a known quantity in the local community and healthcare industry.
- More traffic: Interlinking between your website and other social media pages can lead to more visitors overall. This boost to your site’s visibility will increase the chances of engagement with online forms, appointments, and other in-person events.
- Enhanced credibility: Consistently showing up on social media can help your healthcare organization build a positive reputation. Engaging with your audience in real time to answer questions, posting relevant and useful content, and using calls to action (CTAs) that generate authentic interactions are great strategies to build credibility.
Types of Social Media Platforms
Now that you’ve learned the benefits of social media, we’ll explore the most common platforms your healthcare organization can use. You may choose to use all platforms or focus your efforts on just a few, depending on your target demographic and goals.
- Facebook: Use this platform to share infographics, visuals, videos, and links to other websites. Locally targeted advertising on Facebook is especially effective because users often share their location as part of their profile.
- YouTube: If you have informational or promotional videos, you’ll want to post them to Youtube. Make sure to use relevant keywords in your title and caption so your videos appear in as many searches as possible.
- Instagram: This platform emphasizes engaging visuals and can be linked with Facebook, so content can be posted on both accounts simultaneously. Options such as questions, reactions, and polls can boost engagement.
- Twitter: With an emphasis on short-form content, Twitter is a great place to link to longer articles, press releases, videos, or web pages. Posts about newsworthy events fit well on this platform.
- LinkedIn: Aimed at professionals, this platform is great for sharing content with other healthcare businesses, recruiting nursing professionals, and building your employer brand.
5 Ways to Use Social Media for Healthcare
We’ve explored benefits and types of social media. Now we’ll discuss ways that facilities can use social media for healthcare, with actionable tips in the following areas that you can implement today.
- Raising Awareness
- Public Health Education
- Healthcare Recruitment
- Healthcare Marketing
- Public Engagement
1. Raising Awareness
As a healthcare facility, your organization can play an integral role in keeping the public informed about pressing public health news. This includes timely topics like disease outbreaks, awareness days for individuals with chronic illnesses, and public health advisories.
While your providers and staff are busy keeping their patients informed on the floor, you can scale these efforts by keeping the public informed through social media. This can also help you build authority in the industry, making this a mutually beneficial endeavor for your facility and the people it serves.
Tip: Using eye-catching visuals is key to grasping the attention of audiences on any platform. Make sure to summarize your messages using consistent fonts and colors, and including graphics that make relevant data easy to understand.
2. Public Health Education
Social media is a powerful tool that also can be used for more general health education. Beyond sharing urgent news to keep the public informed, you can also share “best practices” to help them maintain and manage their everyday health, which will help your organization build its credibility as an authority in the field.
Tip: Social media can unfortunately be a common source of misinformation. To ensure your content is authoritative and accurate, it’s important to share information that is written, vetted, or checked by healthcare experts.
3. Healthcare Recruitment
The nursing shortage can pose many hiring challenges for facilities. However, you can combat some of these challenges by utilizing social media for healthcare recruitment. This provides unique avenues for you to connect with prospective employees online, helping you get an edge on the competition.
It’s common for recruiters to reach out to candidates on platforms like LinkedIn. Many organizations also post job notices on Twitter and Instagram to get their openings in front of a wider audience.
Tip: Make sure to utilize analytics data to track the effectiveness of your online recruitment strategies. You’ll be able to determine which strategies and platforms lead to the most responses. It’s best to make this a frequent practice to ensure your hard work is having the intended effect.
4. Healthcare Marketing
All of the efforts you collectively put into social media can help you build your brand and market to stakeholders across the healthcare industry. Posting educational content is one way to enhance your reputation and authority — but you can also advertise news or information that’s directly related to your facility.
If you’re opening a new location or celebrating the receipt of an award, this information can make for great social media snippets to help spread the word about your services or accolades.
Tip: Choose your platforms wisely. It’s important to consider which demographic you most want to reach before diving into social media marketing. If you want to be well known by other members of your industry, LinkedIn might be a good priority. On the other hand, if you want to gain a broader patient audience, targeted Facebook ads could be a better option.
5. Public Engagement
Beyond creating posts, social media enables you to actively engage with prospective patients, providers, and other healthcare organizations. If you publish content on any platform, you’ll likely start getting comments, questions, or feedback from people who come across your posts.
Responding to these comments can show your audiences that you’re not just words on a page. This showcases your commitment to the people you serve, providing another opportunity for you to spread authoritative information and garner more trust in your services. Using social media to highlight notable events like celebrating veterans in your facility for Veterans’ Day is also a great opportunity to humanize your facility and the type of care you provide.
Tip: Make sure that your responses are individualized and thoughtfully written to address the intent of each question or comment. Your audience will be able to spot inauthentic responses that appear formulaic because it won’t provide them with anything of value.
Want More Healthcare-Focused Resources?
Are you in charge of utilizing social media for healthcare marketing campaigns? This can certainly feel like an added burden on top of your other tasks. To help lighten the load, you can find more valuable healthcare marketing tips through IntelyCare’s free newsletter.
IntelyCare writer Katherine Zheng, PhD, BSN, contributed to the writing and research for this article.