How to Incorporate Social Media into Your Medical Marketing Campaign

Social media is the way that word-of-mouth happens in the 21st century, and it is growing at record rate. For example, the popular social networking site, Facebook, has over 200 million active users. Chances are that your employees and patients are already using Facebook, among other social media websites. Rather than letting your patients and prospects have conversations about your practice, ensure that they can have conversations with your medical practice via social media. Social media isn’t going away anytime soon, and most likely, it is going to continue to grow exponentially over the next several years. Rather than waiting until the last minute to incorporate social media into your medical marketing campaign, it’s better to learn how to use social media now and become fluent in social media marketing.

When determining whether or not it would make sense for your medical practice to join the social media revolution, you must first determine what it is you hope to accomplish and if those goals are realistic. If your patients are very happy with your practice, it is a good idea to jump on the social media bandwagon because you can amplify all of the positive conversations about your practice that are taking place in order to promote your medical practice. However, if you are having problems with employees or your patients are unhappy with something, it would be best for you to resolve those issues first before attempting to build your social media presence. Otherwise, you could end up being sucked into a reputation management nightmare.

Getting Started
In order to get started with social media marketing for medical marketing purposes, join free social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. You will find plenty of relevant communities already established on those sites. After tinkering around on these sites for a while, you can determine whether or not it would be worthwhile to establish your own community.

Rather than relying so heavily on a strategy that’s set in stone when launching a social media campaign for medical marketing, use different methods of low-cost experimentation to determine what works and what doesn’t. Time spent planning and theorizing could be spent learning through doing. Just outline your goals and do your best to meet those goals based on the tools and resources you have available.

Proving ROI
Many traditional PR and marketing folks have difficulty embracing social media marketing because they can’t see a clear ROI. In medical marketing or any field for that matter, the ROI of social media marketing is infinite because the cost using social media is so low. Social media marketing can easily be integrated into various marketing and communications efforts in a medical marketing campaign. It isn’t very hard to demonstrate the ROI of running a social media campaign because the overhead costs are miniscule. For example, publishing a blog that allows comments is a very cost-effective way to reach out to patients, potential patients, and media looking for newsworthy stories to cover. You can install an analytics program to determine how many people visit your blog, what they click on, etc., to improve your blog as well as the ROI of your campaign.

Hiring a Consultant
If you’re new to social media and would like to incorporate it into your overall medical marketing campaign, your best bet is to start small and train your current employees that are already working on marketing and communication tasks to integrate social media marketing strategies into their work. Your best bet is to hire a social media marketing consultant to train your employees. If you ever launch a major project and don’t have sufficient internal resources to pull it off, you can always partner up with a social media marketing agency.

Major Social Media Networks
Some major social media websites that anyone interested in medical marketing should be a part of include Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and SlideShare.net. SlideShare.net allows you to share your ideas in the form of Power Point presentations. You can easily embed the slide presentations in your blog to engage your blog readers in your presentations.

On Facebook, medical practices can create fan pages, enabling their patients and potential patients to become “fans.” Anyone who becomes your fan on Facebook will be notified of all of the updates you post. Furthermore, the fact that a user is your fan will be visible to all of their Facebook friends.

Twitter allows you to connect with like-minded people and broaden the scope of your interactions. Two hastags on Twitter that are related to medical marketing include #hcsm and #hcsmktg. Do a search for these hashtags to find out who else in the Twitterverse is talking about medical marketing. You can also find out what kind of conversations are taking place about your medical practice by searching for the name of your medical practice on Twitter. Twitter is a great brand monitoring and reputation management tool. Some companies have gone as far as to use Twitter to address customer service issues.

So there you have it. There’s no better time than now to dive into the world of social media. The effectiveness of your medical marketing campaign can increase significantly with the promotional and networking power of social media. Rather than waiting until you develop an intricate strategy, dive into it now so you can learn the ropes and start connecting with patients and potential patients immediately.