The Critical Role of Social Media Monitoring in the Healthcare Industry

12 min readOct 21, 2020

Today 73% of patients search online for any medical information, which proves the importance of social media for the Healthcare Industry.

Source: Breast Advocate Twitter

Around 70% of US healthcare industry organizations, including medical centers and hospitals, use social media and blogs for organizational promotion. Whether it is professional networking, professional education, patient care, or public health programs, social media is everywhere when we talk about the healthcare sector.

Social media has also touched some of the areas which were difficult to access for the common people — The Operating Room. Surgeons from the Henry Ford Hospital tweeted the live procedure from an operating room to which all doctors, medical students, and nurses followed. They got short updates from the operating room on the kidney surgery to remove the cancerous tumor.

It could be a great marketing tactic that can raise excitement and public awareness about medical organizations where Twitter is one of the best mediums to create a buzz. This way, health organizations can attract new patients and also recruit top medical staff.

With the growing usage of social media, we can say that it has impacted all walks of life, including the healthcare sector, which lays the foundation of health 2.0 for the coming generation. It has made healthcare professionals rethink their marketing mix and include social media as it is easy to identify demand. Apart from this, there are many reasons the healthcare sector needs to tap into the social web to reach their business goals. Let’s discuss in detail:

Why Does the Healthcare Industry Need Social Media Analytics?

Social media has become one of the best ways to stay connected, communicate, and promote services. Social networking sites have evolved with time and became a prevalent way to reach out to consumers and medical professionals. It has helped the healthcare sector to be able to move away from traditional advertising and use the internet to its best advantage.

Modern-day consumers rely on social media -they use social media information to form perception. People use it for the selection of doctors, specialists, and hospitals to reach informed decisions to seek care. Healthcare professionals can leverage this to connect with patients. They can garner attention by sharing updates on new technology with the intent to educate their patients as well as other medical staff. Here are the most important reasons the healthcare industry should utilize social media analytics:

To Build Marketing Strategies

Healthcare professionals will find a wealth of data on social media where patients share experiences with healthcare workers. They can embrace the user-generated data to connect with potential patients and earn more likes and shares by sharing preventive health news. It can also be used to raise awareness for events, new treatments, and more. This information can be segmented across thousands of variables and used to build strategies. Here are some essential categories that you can segregate your information and post it on social media:

Technology updates
Healthcare Topics
Diseases
Drugs
Location of your organization and its branches
Professions of your organizations
Pharmaceuticals

To Quantify the Impact

By quantifying, we mean measuring the impact of social media on your healthcare organization. Using social media analytics, you can categorize data and understand what works for your organization and what not. Begin with calculating the ROI in terms of engagement, revenue, traffic, or queries whatever your goals are. This is how you can quantify the online patient experience and measure the social media value you generate through your health and wellness campaigns. It is going to help doctors, hospitals, healthcare networks, health practitioners, caregivers, healthcare providers, and healthcare marketing executives.

To Find Meaningful Market Insights

You can become a savvy data marketer for your healthcare organization with the insights you get from social media monitoring. It helps you to create reports, including different variables. The report may include a performance overview of your healthcare organization, metric breakdown chart, breakdown of wellness stories you share, and many more. Moreover, you will get to know the engagement rate, daily average impressions, likes per post, and average comments.

After evaluating all these, you can add context to this information and analyze the trends. You can also find what made some post top the charts for a particular month and the time when you posted it. This way, you can use healthcare data to improve social media performance and gain more patients.

To Maintain Transparency and Active Communication

You will find a vast network of healthcare influencers, thought-leaders, patients, and organizations that could be incredibly valuable to answer your unique questions and needs. These are some significant contributors to social media that have dramatically raised the bar in healthcare communication. Not only to seek health information, but social media channels allow two-way public communication between patients, healthcare organizations, and other third parties. This way, they effectively create the largest source of health discussions available today. It includes introducing new doctors in practice, answering patient queries like hours of operation, providing information on pre and post-operative care, and so on.

Social Media Monitoring to Track Success in Healthcare Industry

There is an enormous amount of data available on social media, including healthcare hashtags, but it isn’t useful if you don’t segregate it properly and curate it as desired.

If you tend to post regular updates on healthcare topics, you can use it to assist patients, healthcare professionals, students, and other third parties. Moreover, it facilitates finding and connecting with peers and big leaders in the industry. Apart from this, there are many reasons you can use social media monitoring to track success in the healthcare industry. Have a look:

Build a Marketing Strategy

You will come across different social media channels with a diverse user base with different demographics and interests. You can use it at various marketing stages and design a unique marketing mix that suits your healthcare organization. This way, you can strategize your marketing campaigns to meet the unmet needs of your patients. Physicians can also use it to improve the brand messaging which resonates with the patients and be acted on by them. Also, the insights you get can be used across all departments to distribute evidence-based information to the patients. It will also help counter inaccurate material about treatments and drugs on the internet that will improve the credibility of your healthcare organization.

Foster Discussions with Stakeholders

People who mention your healthcare services are essential, but people who make up the entire conversation are also important. They can also provide you with useful insights as they help understand people’s attitudes towards the organization and facilitate more target messaging.

However, the audiences that make up the conversation are common people, including patients and caregivers that are not affected directly but offer meaningful insights. It helps to understand how your services are being portrayed and whether people are interested in your services or not. Supposedly, you have tweeted about HIV treatment, then there would be people who will mention your brand, and there will also be people who will discuss various aspects of the disease. Diving deeper, you will get to know what people need and demand about HIV treatment. You will also come across a different set of audiences who are discussing the same at various platforms, which could be your potential patients.

To Improve Your Services

Customer services are an integral part of the healthcare industry where the customers want to approach the organization easily. You can use social media monitoring to streamline customer service management. As your brand is easily accessible on social media, people can approach you directly doesn’t matter whether they want to complain or give feedback.

With the help of social media analytics, you can implement an excellent customer service system. This will facilitate team-building with various customer service professionals to handle customer queries where they can also employ chatbots to do so. Offering real-time solutions to customers will help strengthen the bond, turning them into loyal customers for a lifetime.

To Measure Your Efforts

Social media analytics is the best way to keep a stock of your audience’s responses in an organized manner. It is important for proper social media management in the healthcare sector. It will help you know whether you are reaching the right set of audience and level of engagement you drive. You will also know about the accessible content from which you can take inspiration to design your social media campaigns.

Social media monitoring will help uncover important insights about your social media activities and identify the weak areas that need improvement. It will ultimately help you reach your goals and business objectives.

To Create Patient-centric Social Media Campaigns

Healthcare brands can leverage social media to engage their audience through different social media campaigns. They can use particular hashtags, online contests, and quizzes to trigger interest. They can also use hashtags innovatively to introduce its healthcare brand and spread brand awareness.

Healthcare organizations can showcase patient stories that evoke emotions of empathy. The best example for such campaigns is from the New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where they posted the story of Michael Kiernan. It triggered emotions and sparked many responses.

Source: Penji.co

Such ad campaigns showcasing patient stories build trust in their audience and targeted customers as they get to know how nurses and doctors helped these patients in times of dire need.

To Build Your Healthcare Brand and Relationships Online

Online reputation management is an integral part of social media monitoring, where it can be used to spread a positive word of mouth about the healthcare brand. Here patient testimonials, positive reviews, and feedback play a significant role in building your brand, improving authority and credibility. Patients tend to trust your brand, which helps in generating new leads. It also helps to maintain a long-lasting relationship with the employees and loyal patients. As your image improves over social media, your happy customers will talk about you more, which will somehow expand your customer base.

Source: Penji.co

Here PillPack shared a social media campaign where it shared its article published by Forbes. It turned out to be extremely useful and provided a piece of evidence depicting people’s dependability on them. It enhanced the credibility of the brand as it brought one of the most reliable sources, Forbes, to testify their reliability.

To Get Real-time Updates and Understand Competition

Administrators in big healthcare organizations keep close tabs with their competitors through social media. They keep some critical factors in mind to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns their competitors are using. These factors could include community involvement, customer pain points, and service lines their competitors have introduced. Moreover, customer feedback and usage of new technologies and procedures and how they impact the lives of patients are also considered.

Since everyone is vocal about their feelings on social media, healthcare professionals pursue comments that give an idea about the latest technologies their competitors are using. This way, they get an idea of developing their own response plan as to how they will deal with all this. If you are just ramping up your social media strategy, taking note of different social media channels where your competitors are active will remove a lot of guesswork, and you can start therein.

Apart from this, healthcare professionals can easily communicate about emergencies where social media analytics provide notifications. They get instant updates, which could prove to be life-saving. Also, public healthcare agencies can get access to real-time updates. For instance, social media proved to be a lifesaver in the 2018 flu pandemic where #Flu or #FluView on Twitter revealed the cause of new flu cases that surged the number.

They can also use a marketing campaign to create a sense of urgency like heathcare.gov created a campaign with deadlines and used a lot of trigger words such as last chance and don’t miss out. This way they triggered people and were successful at having a fast response on people’s part.

Social Media Monitoring — KPIs Healthcare Industry Should Track

You cannot measure your efforts unless you know the KPIs that actually give you a clear picture of what you did to improve your brand image on social media. KPIs are such values that measure your marketing campaign’s performance, whether it was effective to create a positive brand image or not. You will find numerous KPIs to track, measure, and analyze properly to expand your brand’s commercial reach. Thus you can increase your engagement, boost revenue, and improve your ROI.

The common KPIs which every social media marketer uses to track your performance are:

Leads– Assess the number of meaningful and convertible leads you are generating through your social media campaigns.

Reach– How many customers your posts and other content have reached on social media? It is an important question to understand the intensity of your posts. The number of fans on social media and a number of subscribers can change the game. You should keep an eye on how many fans you have gained and how many you lost at a particular time. It will help you understand which content is performing the best.

Engagement– Engagement is another important metric that focuses on how many people your content was successful at interacting and engaging.

Also, how many ways have you tried engaging your customers? Here link clicks are important as they give you an understanding about what type of content is attracting clicks. Also, average shares per post can tell you about the audience’s reception of your content. All this will help you create campaigns that can help you strike a positive chord with your audience.

Conversions– Lastly, conversions hold the complete weight, which assesses how many people have converted through your social media posts and have become regular customers. More conversions depict that your campaign has the potential to nurture leads and it perfectly resonates with what people want. Some of the common conversions to measure at each touchpoint are:

Website visit/email open to link click through social media
Link click to form submission
Lead to MQL (Marketing Qualified Leads)
MQL to SAL (Sales Accepted Leads)
SAL to opportunity
Opportunity to a closed deal

Also, ROI is the holy grail of all social media KPIs that depicts the value of your marketing efforts and social media campaigns. Here you will get to know the unnecessary activities that are costing you a lot and eating up your funds so that you can focus on activities that need your time and are worth investing.

How Mentionlytics Can Help?

When you belong to the healthcare industry, it could be a little challenging to handle and understand tons of information uploaded on social media. Doing it manually can eat up your time and energy, and it is going to be extremely exhaustive. Instead, we recommend using social media monitoring tools to track a patient’s behavior, preferences, sentiments, competitors, and engagement.

We know tracking key social media metrics could be a challenge for you, so it’s best to invest in social media monitoring tools like Mentionlytics, it will seriously help you. With Mentionlytics, you can enjoy a stress-free time as it offers numerous features that are incredibly beneficial for you, such as:

You can collect important insights
Look for trends and strategize your campaign
Access to mention insights
Find the right influencers for your healthcare brand
Grow your brand’s reputation and improve services
Know more about your competitors, services, technical updates, and industry
Discover public opinion about your healthcare brand
Complete media coverage, including social media, online news, blogs, and any website

Apart from this, you can also join in forum discussions, comments, and blog posts to spread awareness about your brand with Mentionlytics.

So, what are you thinking about? Get started with a free version here!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics :
https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/the-critical-role-of-social-media-monitoring-in-the-healthcare-industry