How to Increase Social Media Engagement for Your Healthcare Business

1. How to Increase Social Media Engagement for Your Healthcare Business Social media plays a vital role in healthcare digital marketing. The right strategies help with optimal social media engagement and customer retention. Social media plays a significant role in healthcare digital marketing. Today, people are more likely to look up general health queries online instead of asking a healthcare professional. Social networks, blogs, discussion forums and other digital media platforms are a primary medium for communication between patients and physicians, medical practices and businesses. With every year, the number of potential patients using social media is increasing and medical practices and medical centers are using social media as an effective marketing tool. Same is the case with consumers looking for healthcare equipment and other products.

2. How can healthcare businesses improve their brands’ social engagement with prospective consumers? •Post valuable content: It is a known fact that posting valuable content will help you improve engagement. The objective should be to post content that speaks to the potential audience, understands their needs, desires, fears, and pain points. Focusing on your potential customers and publishing posts that satisfy their needs is most important. •Perform proper research: Make sure to conduct a thorough research about the content instead of playing a guessing game. Identify the likes and dislikes of your audience and examine what kind of content has worked in the past. Tools like Ahrefs and Buzzsumo can be used to understand what kinds of headlines and blog posts perform the best when shared via social media and identify important indicators such as total engagement, social media channel breakdown and much more. •Use of hashtags: Hashtags constitute a tool that lets you connect with like-minded people quickly. Use relevant hashtags that are short and easy-to-spell words or phrases. It should give the audience a clear understanding of the topic of conversation. •Conduct Q and A sessions: Question and Answer session or Ask Me Anything sessions are popular on social media platforms. It helps you know more about your patients, and share in their concerns. The more patients interact with you or your medical brand the better it is as it helps you build a good rapport. •Share Influencer Content: Find the relevant influencers to align with your healthcare business. Identify what content in your niche is getting the most engagement and find out who is creating it, share their content and reach out to them. Once you have identified influencers that suit your brand, invite them to share your content. •Call-to-Action: A well-placed call-to-action (CTA) will help readers engage with you more. Speak to them, understand their emotions and then hit them with CTA. You may have to move from the social media platform to your content or take them to the landing page on your website. You can also ask open-ended questions that are thought provoking or encourage them to share more. This will help you engage with your audience more constructively. •Be consistent with your posts: A 2018 industry research report from Sprout Social shows that the ideal time to post on Facebook are Wednesday 12 to 2 pm and Thursday from 1 to 2 pm; on Twitter, it is Friday from 9 to 10 am or from 10 am to noon on most days. Make sure that you post regularly on your social media or you can automate your social media posts with tools like Buffer or schedule them on CoSchedule.

3. •Actively engage with others: Interacting with your audience is crucial to know how your brand is perceived. A lot of engagement reflects positive perception. There may be negative comments also. The best way to handle negative comments is to keep your response short and sweet, show them the FAQ resources or take the negative conversation out of the public eye. •Post surveys and polls: Posting surveys and polls on Twitter and Facebook is easy and a great way to strengthen engagement and know about your audience. It helps you generate original content and may even enable you to develop a new service or product. •Use videos, GIF and images: Add visual effects to your content to make it look special from other content. This strategy also lets your audience understand better about the content. Adding visual effect to your content helps to improve your retention rate up to 65 percent. People tend to get attracted more towards content with visual elements. Snapping your own photo, adding light filter, and superimposing text are appealing and could encourage people to share instinctively. •Get feedback: Asking the opinion of your audience and getting their feedback and suggestions is always important. You can also get their opinion about free shipping, discount codes etc. •Use Live videos: Almost 35 percent of marketers use live video to reach their intended audience. On Facebook, live videos have an average of 4.3 percent engagement rate when compared to non-live content which is at 2.2 percent. Posting live video also prevents the need for editing pictures or adding graphics and it saves time. •Use paid promotions: To reach out to a larger audience and improve social media engagement, paid promotion is a good solution. However, finding the right combination of ad copy, landing pages, headlines and offerings could be challenging. But with plenty of how to guides, successful paid promotion need not be very difficult. •Conduct giveaways: People love getting freebies or service at cheap rates. So send out giveaways that are worthwhile and rewarding. A 2 or 5 percent discount on any of the medical services is not very attractive. So give at least a 20 percent discount or free meals, free trips etc. •Promote and partner up: The best way to generate more engagement and reach out to a wider audience is by partnering up with another brand. You need to find a business that isn’t your direct competitor but still have similarities enough to have a similar audience. Following are some of the options to consider: ✓Post content given by your new partner ✓Craft a post on behalf of your new partner

4. ✓Co-produce a piece of content that you both share. Many medical practices are utilizing social media platforms to be in touch with the patient. According to Carol Vance, a patient engagement platform developer, the following factors are important for patient engagement: ✓Providing relevant content: Deliver valuable content to individual audience. Using user profiles and using their demographics data could help generate relevant content. ✓Engage customers continuously: Give messages and content that are relevant to the situation that drives them towards a desired outcome. This helps the patients push further along in the customer lifecycle. ✓Build loyalty and advocacy over time: According to research from Teradata, 61 percent of people say they would tell their friends and family about their good experiences and that 27 percent would sign up for a company’s loyalty program. Social media is a strong digital tool that helps healthcare consumers to engage with their desired providers. It helps new businesses to ensure client satisfaction through meaningful engagement. An SEO company in Long Island, NY can provide the right strategies for optimum social media engagement and improve customer intake and retention. www.medresponsive.com