Social media is an essential online marketing and outreach tool for any organization that wants to connect to the largest audience possible. However, health organizations — like hospitals — can face unique challenges in managing social media, which can make effectively leveraging these tools less straightforward. Many large hospitals have been successful in making social media work for them.
Hospital Social Media Use Can Bolster Connections
Social media provides a constant opportunity for growing connections with the widest possible audience. This enables a hospital to build relationships within its community and provide a range of advantages. Improved patient engagement can help keep people aware of the full range of resources they have access to, give a heads-up on any important information and offer an extra way to provide health education. For example, many hospitals use social media to provide diagrams on topics like managing diabetes with the right diet or spotting the signs of a heart attack.
John Hopkins
Like the other healthcare facilities on this list, the Johns Hopkins Hospital utilizes narrative to create an authentic connection with patients, driving strong engagement numbers. Part of what sets it apart, however, is the kind of content it creates to build those connections. Johns Hopkins has a sizeable following on YouTube. There, the hospital’s social media team takes advantage of some of the best features of video, like its ability to make content that might come across as a bit dry in other mediums, much more engaging.
This social media strategy has yielded big engagement numbers and brought a lot of extra attention to the hospital. For example, the story of one patient whose seizures led to successful but high-stakes pediatric brain surgery has racked up nearly 2 million views since its publication a few years ago.
Other videos on Johns Hopkins’s channel take advantage of the power of virtual medical imagery to break down complicated procedures and inform the audience. One video about the Whipple Procedure, a common surgical intervention for patients with pancreatic cancer, garnered more than 800,000 views.