With social media, healthcare providers now have greater insight into the patient experience than ever before. With patients going online to research their health and talk about their concerns, it’s essential for marketers to have a plan in place for monitoring social media conversations. Doing so enables you to:
Become an Online Health Educator: Pay attention to posts about specific diseases and conditions or general health and wellness questions. This provides an opportunity to join conversations and talk about medical treatments and procedures or to serve up clinical expertise from your physicians. Providing valuable and interesting information lends credibility and establishes your organization as a thought leader.
Find Your Brand Evangelists: Monitoring can reveal those patients who voluntarily compliment your organization and its staff. Reach out to these advocates and keep an authentic connection and dialogue with them. Enable them to serve as ambassadors for your facility—many patients want to extend their gratitude and are receptive to telling their stories across multiple communications platforms.
Manage Your Facility’s Reputation: Uncovering conversations from patients who are frustrated can prevent a PR crisis and preserve your organization’s reputation. A monitoring service coupled with a plan for managing misinformation and negative comments enables you to quickly repair disparaging remarks before they escalate.
Tap into Market Research: While you can always pose questions, listening to natural conversations helps you better understand community needs and perhaps discover opportunities to serve patients’ unmet healthcare needs.
Keep Tabs on Competitors: Not only can you keep an eye on industry trends, you can keep an eye on your competition. What are their patients saying about them? What services and programs are they launching? This can be invaluable business intelligence for strategic planning.
Follow your Brand’s Health: A social listening platform helps you understand your brand over time and looks for trends related to your marketing efforts, buzz lifecycles and your share of voice.
There are numerous monitoring tools (Klout, HootSuite, Google Alerts, Facebook Insights, to name a few) and many others with varying degrees of analytics and functionality. To help you get started on your research to the perfect monitoring service, we’ve listed a few others below:
Trackur: Trackur offers customizable social media insights and monitoring tools at affordable prices for individuals, small companies, large corporations and agencies.
Social Studio: Salesforce launched Social Studio, which is a combination of Radian6 and Buddy Media. It combines a social media monitoring platform with content publishing capabilities.
Brandwatch: Brandwatch has a social media monitoring tool with some of the best reports in the industry. The tool offers brands the ability to get in depth market research while also measuring campaign impact and the social conversation.
Mention: Mention combines social monitoring, analytics and competitor updates. The real-time dashboard also sorts by social authority, accounts with the most reach and negative mentions. This tool will help you to better reach and engage with your advocates.
Keyhole: Keyhole allows brands to become thought leaders by tracking specific industry keywords and hashtags, for real time or future engagement. The platform also allows brands to monitor both their own and competitors posts to help optimize content strategy.
Sentiment Metrics: Sentiment Metrics does similar monitoring to all of these other services, with a focus on Sentiment; allowing brands to engage with consumers to maintain positive perception and reputation quickly and efficiently.
