How Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Can Help Healthcare Systems?

10 min readJun 9, 2021

Healthcare systems face the biggest challenge of reaching out to a new audience and drive high engagement. When we talk about healthcare systems, it covers pretty much everything including hospitals, specialty clinics, urgent care facilities, dental care, pharmacies, and more.

After the tremendous uncertainty and economic instability that the COVID-19 pandemic has created, the healthcare industry is facing great downtime. The turmoil and lack of confidence that the healthcare systems showed, the attitude of people towards hospitals and medical facilities have taken a bad hit.

Only 24% of US adults trust the claim that companies are putting their health first before making business decisions. Despite the protocols and precautions, people are hesitant to walk straight to a medical facility.

What does this mean for healthcare marketers?

Through the lens of COVID-19, as it is not going to leave us any sooner, healthcare systems and marketers have to reconsider their social media marketing strategy. If the healthcare systems want to stay competitive, they need to take the help of social media monitoring and analysis. And with the help of social media monitoring, they would need to focus on a few high-level areas that include:

Brand awareness
Brand reputation
Demand generation
Communication and public relations
Imparting education regarding healthcare systems to patients and partners

So, are you ready to supercharge your social media marketing for the healthcare systems?

We have got some really awesome stuff, you would surely implement it in your social media marketing. Just keep reading!

How Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Can Benefit Healthcare Systems?

Where do we look if we are to make potent improvements in healthcare systems? The straight answer to this question is social media marketing. We are in times when even the slightest of the information is a click away. 80% of people are searching for information related to healthcare on social media. Whether you want to improve health outcomes, develop a community of practitioners, educate patients, motivate patients, or provide critical information, social media monitoring is effective.

Not only this, there are a lot many benefits that healthcare systems can have on implementing social media monitoring. Some of them are mentioned below:

Social media monitoring and analytics help you find relevant healthcare conversations on various social media handles.
Provide deeper marketing insights about the needs and preferences of your own healthcare community.
Continuous monitoring of social media channels helps you improve customer service.
It allows contributing to educating your patients by showcasing expertise on various social media handles.
The proper analysis helps you in understanding the sentiments of the public and identifying key influencers.
Keeping an eye on competitors, your patients, their behavior, and competitor tactics, helps to improve your approach. The complete analysis helps find loopholes in your strategy so you can work on them. As you come with a unique concept it establishes you as a thought leader in the industry.
It gives you real-time updates and helps to resolve patient queries.

Now, have a look at how healthcare systems are implementing social media monitoring in the next section.

How Healthcare Systems are Using Social Media Monitoring?

Source: debcb.com

If you look closely, you will recognize the need of patients who are turning to social media for recommendations. As they are researching before booking an appointment, they need assistance. Here social media influencers are playing a crucial role in exposing your brand to a larger set of audiences.

When it comes to social media monitoring and analysis in the healthcare system, the best thing they have come across are influencers. Social media monitoring helps healthcare systems find relevant influencers for their services. They are helping the organizations to reach a new set of audiences. Healthcare systems are using the influencer’s sphere to promote their services and line of products. Interestingly, the influencer’s audience is responding and lining up well with the target demographics of the healthcare systems. Moreover, the engagement of local influencers is pretty high and successful in garnering thousands of new followers for the brand.

Have a look at the promotional strategy of UnitedHealth Group. They use various social media platforms to advertise their services. Here they make use of campaigns, quizzes, and dares to engage a higher number of followers. One such interactive campaign is #WeDareYoutoShare, which was a hashtag challenge where the company asked for fun dares.

In the first one, the company asked to share a photo or telling the routine of how people are getting physically active and share it with #GetActive. Another challenge was the “we dare you” challenge that had a muscle quiz with 1–30 questions about muscles to enter the contest and win prizes. The last dare was followed by a concentration game “WeDareYou” to match the healthy snack, get these three matched to enter the game.

What was the Idea and How it Helped the Healthcare Systems of UnitedHealth Group?

The entire campaign was a part of the company’s Source4Women, digital and social health & wellness resources. The idea was to encourage people to make one small change to live a healthier life.

Here each dare and corresponding photo was linked to United Healthcare’s consumer website. The visitors and customers got instant access to the resources related to wellness and healthcare. It educated people further about healthy living and encouraged them to follow the same.

How it Impacted the Healthcare Marketing of the Company?

If you closely look at the actions it incited, people shared the challenge with their families and friends on a mass level. With the help of continuous social media monitoring, the company got crucial insights into the audience’s likes and dislikes. It helped the organization to understand the level of engagement the campaign could generate. Also, the mass traffic was directed to the website of the United Healthcare Group.

Moreover, the campaign was promoted by many influential bloggers that belonged to the health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness niche. This way, the organization got to know about popular influencers on social media, which it could approach to be a part of their marketing strategy for other services as well.

It helped the organization to establish a meaningful relationship with thousands of patients and customers as the chief marketing, product & innovation officer at UnitedHealthcare, Yasmine Winkler said. “We are connecting and engaging with thousands of people every month and fostering an interactive, online relationship to help empower people to take charge of their health and enhance their quality of life.”

How Can You Use Social Media Monitoring for Healthcare Systems?

Being active on social media is not an option for the healthcare industry and keeping an eye on the trends is another crucial thing that cannot be missed. Here social media monitoring is of great help in identifying the triggers and strategizing the next level of activities that incite engagement. It can be useful for healthcare systems in many ways right from establishing communication to presenting oneself as a brand.

As we discussed above, the United Healthcare Group social media campaign and how they kept an eye on every moment of customers and visitors altogether. The campaign was a massive hit and they got incredible market insights. These market insights include public perception, the number of likes and dislikes, public sentiments, engagement, traffic, and scope of services. All these will help them strategize their marketing efforts in the future.

So, can’t you use social media monitoring to streamline the activities of your healthcare systems? If you don’t know how to go about it, here we are with a few tactics that you can implement for sure.

Let’s have a look:

#1 Engage Patients and Reduce Costs

After the introduction of social media in healthcare, the face of healthcare has evolved. If you closely look at the trends, you will realize that the healthcare systems today are more of a consumer-based entity. 54% of Millennials and 42% of all adults wish to follow their doctors. To engage patients, healthcare providers need to shift their mindsets from providers to retailers and develop a patient-centered strategy.

Here you need the help of data that you will get by continuously monitoring the social media activities that happen on your handles. Keep track of what is being said about your services, which will give you an idea, whether your patients are liking it or not. The more you keep close tabs on your patients’ feedback, FAQs, and comments, the more you know about their preferences.

As you consider their feedback and work on identifying the weakness and work on improving your services, customers would feel satisfied. 60% of doctors already think that social media improves the quality of care for patients.

You will experience greater patient engagement and higher customer satisfaction after you provide better patient care. Your prompt replies and work will speak for you; so, you don’t need to spend any extra dollars on marketing that will drastically reduce the overall costs of your marketing.

#2 Track Audience Behavior

Social media is not only to make pages to create brand awareness, there’s a lot to explore and experience. Why not harness the power of social media monitoring to track audience behavior? Begin by creating vibrant, engaging patient communities. It will help increase search traffic for your practice.

All you need to keep track of visitors, ratio of likes and dislikes, and comments. You will get an idea of what is on people’s minds. Take care of their preferences and include them in your services. It will not only increase the patient volume on your social media handle but will also result in higher engagement that will eventually lead to conversions.

Make sure that you create patient-focused web communities. Here you can educate your patients and partners by showcasing vital health tips. Also, you can post personal stories of your patients and members of staff. Track the parameters mentioned above, and analyze the impact of your content, which is bringing you more traffic. Post the content that your patients are liking the most.

#3 Develop Consistency

By developing consistency, we mean to be in the eyes of your patients, bloggers, partners, and influencers by posting content and replying to their queries. No matter if your practice is large or small, be consistent to survive in today’s competitive healthcare marketplace. Make sure you deliver focused messages with a positive and consistent tone. All you need to do is to track mentions, check comments, and analyze the needs of the patients. As you discover what your patient wants, you can work on improving your services.

#4 Deliver Personalized Information and Frequent Updates

Social media monitoring and analysis have proved to be revolutionary in times of COVID-19 when it bridged the gap between patients and healthcare systems. Personalized information and frequent updates with the help of continuous monitoring of the information loaded about the novel coronavirus, was the key. It helped healthcare systems showcase their positive impact after understanding the current need.

The data that was getting generated every moment during the pandemic helped the healthcare systems in high-quality research and analysis. It genuinely helped to simplify the way healthcare systems tackled the entire issue during the pandemic.

#5 Better Decision Making

Every activity in marketing is carried out with the intent to draw a meaningful conclusion and reach a decision. Similarly, healthcare systems use social media monitoring to understand the impact of one activity on critical decision-making. It has helped in making frequent advances in developing tools for diagnosis, new medicines, or updating healthcare technology. Social media monitoring has been extremely helpful in exploring disruptive opportunities.

How Mentionlytics Can Help?

We have discussed the importance of data in social media monitoring and analysis. Can you track everything manually?

Tracking the key social media metrics the conventional way is difficult and challenging for healthcare organizations. You cannot chase every comment on your social media handles and waste time. Considering today’s competitive environment, healthcare brands will need the help of social media monitoring tools that can save their precious time and are affordable.

Mentionlytics is one of the best social listening tools that offer incredible benefits from accessing mention insights to growing your brand reputation online in the healthcare sector.

Let’s have a look at what Mentionlytics has to offer to your brand:

You can collect crucial market insights that will aid your research in the healthcare systems,
With the help of Mentionlytics, you can discover current trends and strategize your healthcare campaign
It gives you easy access to mention insights of your healthcare systems,
If you are struggling to find the right influencers for your healthcare brand, you can get through Mentionlytics.
It will help you grow your brand’s reputation and sales
You can easily understand competition and gain insights into your competitors, products, and industry by keeping a close eye on their strategies
Here you will get to discover different public perceptions at a time. You will know the current feelings of the public and what it has to say about your brand
It gives you complete media coverage, including social media, online news, blogs, and any website.
You can also join in forum discussions, comments, and blog posts to spread awareness about your brand

Get started with a free version here!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/social-media-monitoring-analytics-healthcare-systems