Health IT, Hospitals

Healthcare social media: Five tips for growing hospital blog traffic

Not all hospital blogs are created equally. The less-useful hospital blogs appear little more than […]

Not all hospital blogs are created equally.

The less-useful hospital blogs appear little more than an afterthought, marketing ploys with less-than-compelling content that are updated infrequently, attracting few readers and doing little to advance hospitals’ objectives.

To be clear, hospital blog posts that run into the millions of page views are rare and unlikely. But by setting your sights lower — say the thousands or tens of thousands — you can come up with a realistic plan for generating buzz around your hospital and traffic for its web properties. And the good news is that it gets easier over time.

“It’s really trial and error but, after having done this for a couple years, you discover what resonates with your community,” said Kristin Hall, social media strategist for Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.

But what’s the best way to go about finding out what actually piques the interest of your community, and where do you begin? MedCity News spoke with several hospital marketers to glean best practices and tips that they’ve discovered.

  • Build the framework: It’s obvious but it bears mentioning — if you haven’t made the time and effort to build the infrastructure in the first place, you can’t move quickly or take advantage of a story or topic that could bring positive attention to your hospital. Take, for example, Mayo Clinic‘s most successful post, a video of an elderly couple performing a piano duet at the hospital. The video racked up more than 2 million YouTube views in less than two months, with total views now in the neighborhood of 8 million. “If we don’t have a presence on Facebook, our blog and Twitter, it doesn’t take off like that,” said Lee Aase, director of Mayo’s social media center. “Prepare the framework. Then when something like that comes along, it can take off.”
  • Localize it, don’t criticize it: The traditional approach of adding a local perspective to a national or international story is as applicable to hospital blogs as it is to big-city newspapers. The formula can work for any topic on which a hospital’s employees can offer expertise, from an E. coli outbreak overseas to the CEO’s perspective on how a proposed federal law might affect the nation’s hospitals. For example, one of the top items to appear on the blog of Chicago-based Rush University Medical Center was a first-hand account of how a few of the hospital’s doctors helped with relief efforts after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, according to Thurston Hatcher, managing editor of Rush’s web properties.
  • Serve a niche that’s otherwise been neglected: It’s true that a 10-minute video is  less likely to go viral and reach into the millions of page views the way a 90-second clip might, but that doesn’t mean hospitals should ignore longer videos. Find a topic your physicians have expertise in that is underrepresented on the web and create some content around it. A 10-minute Mayo Clinic video of a physician discussing a bone marrow cancer called myelofibrosis became an important resource for patients and families suffering from the condition, established Mayo as experts in the area and has led some patients suffering from the disease to seek treatment at the hospital. “It may have only gotten several thousands of viewers, but they’re the right several thousand,” Aase said.
  • Take advantage of interest in human interest: Lots of people — not to mention local TV stations — love stories of community members who overcome long odds to beat a formidable opponent. Hospitals are built for these kind of stories. And let’s be honest, if the stories are about people who are young and/or attractive, that’s only going to make it more enticing to local media outlets, especially TV. Barnes-Jewish Hospital got lots of mileage out of intense local interest around a 23-year-old heart transplant patient named Megan Moss, posting numerous updates on her operation and recovery over the course of more than a year. One post featured a video interview with Barnes-Jewish’s director of heart transplant.  “It was just one of those human interest stories that resounded with the public,” said Hall of Barnes-Jewish.
  • Don’t overlook  unusual nonmedical stories: Just because a topic doesn’t fit the doctor-saves-patient story construction, doesn’t mean it isn’t good blog fodder. One of the top blog entries for North Carolina-based WakeMed Health & Hospitals featured time-lapse videos from the hospital’s helipads of a tornado that swept through the area. “Just pay attention to what’s going on,” said Heather Monackey, a WakeMed spokeswoman. “That’s my biggest piece of advice.”

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