Nowadays, the primary role of social media in healthcare is to engage your target audience. These social platforms are very important and can serve as the primary tool for achieving marketing and SEO goals.
Why is Social Media Important in Healthcare?
The importance of social media in healthcare increases with each day. The usage of such platforms as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram will serve to boost your exposure; these platforms have gone beyond being just a simple trend. Social media has a great impact on healthcare, and it should be treated as a reliable source that provides you with great brand awareness opportunities.
Social media and healthcare marketing includes a vast number of platform choices. By planning a social media strategy for your brand, you can be faced with an overwhelming number of evolving platforms. Sometimes it can be hard to choose the one that accurately caters to your business needs.
You can narrow down your choices by taking into account the main types of social media. The right platform can give you unlimited access to your target audience, bringing you closer to achieving your marketing goals.
What Social Media Platform Should I Use?
There are three core types of healthcare social media marketing platforms: social networks, photo & video sharing platforms, and blogging & community-building networks. Each category has its own pros and cons and specializes in different business needs.
Social Networks
Social networks are the most common type of social media to be used for healthcare communication and marketing purposes. The most popular business social networks are Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These social media platforms allow users to interact with each other in different ways.
Facebook is the most populated social network with more than two billion monthly active users. Besides showing the humane side of your business – making closer ties – it is a great advertising platform. Your ads can be deeply customized, turning your followers into leads and, eventually, loyal customers.
If we’re talking about Twitter, then it’s all about immediacy. This social network works well with breaking news, important announcements, and other situations.
LinkedIn is a professional B2B & B2C social network. It is mostly used for lead generation. Also, you can share your themed blog articles there to establish your trusted brand’s authority.
All these social media platforms allow you to communicate using tagging and hashtagging. Your content can be shared or commented on, and you can also make interactions with other users using the reactions, private messages, and other multifaceted approaches.
Photo & Video Sharing
There are 4 main platforms that offer photo and video sharing as a marketing tool – Instagram (photo/video), Pinterest (photo/video), YouTube (video), and Vimeo (video).
Instagram and Pinterest will help you to visualize your brand. By updating your Instagram, you can use different approaches to your grid layout. It helps to reflect your brand style better and to establish a devoted community. Due to very close integration with Facebook, all your Instagram ads can be profoundly customized to reach your target audience. Moreover, Instagram became the main influencer marketing platform. Around 90% of influencer campaigns take place on this platform every year.
Pinterest provides you with relatively the same opportunities, offering to arrange your content with themed boards. In addition, Pinterest is a more sales-oriented platform, since around 85% of users browse it with a purchase need.
When we think about video marketing, the first thought crossing our minds is YouTube. It is the largest video streaming platform that engages about two billion active monthly users. Having a wide audience, YouTube also provides you with strong promotion SEO capabilities. As for Vimeo, it is smaller than YouTube, but it has the benefit of being highly community-driven.
Blogging & Community Building
Blogging and community-building platforms allow you to publish niche topics, start themed conversations, comment, and interact with other users. Such social media platforms can be useful in terms of external SEO. You can share your blog articles with links leading to your website.
The most popular blogging platforms are Tumbler, Reddit, Quora, and Medium. They all allow you to feature your posts with photos or videos about your topic, making them more attention-grabbing.
Social Media and Healthcare – How to Choose
There are a lot of other social media platforms in healthcare besides the ones mentioned above, such as Clutch, Behance, Dribble, TikTok, Snapchat, etc. To meet your business marketing objectives and overcome challenges of social media in healthcare, you need to narrow down your choices.
The best way to do that is to follow a simple checklist. Answering the following questions can help you make the choice easily:
- Who is your target audience?
- What social media communication channels do they use?
- What are your primary marketing goals regarding your audience? (reach out to new leads, improve your communication and customer support, increase your website traffic, etc.)
- What types of content can you produce? (posts, photos, videos, podcasts, webinars, etc.)
- Can you hire an additional team member to run your social media platforms?
To build your brand awareness along with new leads and traffic generation, it is better to maintain several social media profiles. You should certainly register with Facebook and complement it with LinkedIn, Instagram, or YouTube. The important thing is to register an account with a social media platform that is most related to your niche.
