When patients need a healthcare provider, it is usually for a specific purpose, which makes it difficult to get individuals to casually interact with a healthcare provider on social media. Brands need to create smart and appealing content to engage with their audience, but also build trust and communication with future and existing patients. Rise Interactive partnered with NorthShore University HealthSystem to do just that. NorthShore, a leading, award-winning health system with four major hospitals in the Chicago area, was looking for a way to share quality content with its target market in a fun and easily digestible way. They also wanted to build trust among the community by allowing its current and future patients to interact with their physicians online. In order to create their social media strategy, Rise first conducted a competitive analysis of other hospitals’ social marketing efforts. Two gaps that were identified as areas for opportunity included creating and promoting infographics via Facebook and live tweeting NorthShore’s online physician chats on Twitter. To maximize exposure and peak interest, Rise created an ongoing stream of infographics that aligned with national health-related observances and seasonal events. In the summertime, Rise created and shared content about summer safety topics such as proper sunscreen application and in the fall, created a “Back to School" guide. Rise also created infographics to spread awareness during Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October and a holiday-themed health and safety guide in December. Aligning NorthShore’s infographics with seasonal themes allowed them to be a part of the conversation that was relevant and important to their audience, while building trust and growing affinity for the brand. In order to reach out to the social community who was not already a “fan" of NorthShore, Rise utilized Facebook’s promotional options to further increase the exposure of the infographics. Each infographic had its own unique targeting strategy to increase relevance and likelihood of engagement. Rise leveraged the capabilities of Facebook’s Power Editor in order to deliver relevant messages to the most appropriate audience. For Twitter, Rise focused on Twitter chats and used the hashtag #NSChats. Rise held ongoing, themed chats with various industry experts and NorthShore’s own physicians. Discussions addressed a variety of healthcare-related topics relevant for the audience, ranging from breast and prostate cancer chats to back pain and brain tumor chats. In order to increase engagement and raise awareness, Rise identified and targeted influencers in the space to drive participation. NorthShore’s social media strategy has taken excellent, complex medical work and has created digestible and interactive ways for their patients to engage with them. Rise helped amplify NorthShore’s expertise with a targeted outreach strategy and capture audiences no matter where they were in their patient journey.NorthShore’s metrics for success included overall engagement (in the form of post likes, post comments and post shares), as well as clicks to the website. People engaged and shared on Facebook, but also clicked through to the website, driving traffic to NorthShore.org. In the posts on Facebook, Rise created an image with a teaser of each infographic, along with content and a link. In order to view the full infographic, users had to click through to NorthShore’s blog. For the #NSchats, the tweets and transcripts are all placed on the blog where users can also interact. They can see a curated list of questions and answers following the chat, providing a resource for patients even after the chats concluded. Rise was able to optimize the promotion and targeting of each campaign based on analytics gathered on key performance metrics. The breast cancer awareness infographic was liked 1,641 times and shared 218 times, which was 1,782% and 249% more than an average NorthShore post. The overall reach of the social campaign to date has provided 1.6 million impressions and has increased NorthShore’s followers 291% since this time last year. The infographics were a key part of that increase. The Twitter chat and influencer targeting program has also been extremely successful. Many thought leaders in various fields have found NorthShore’s chats valuable and have supported NorthShore through engaging in content sharing or chat participation. By taking a data-driven approach to creating compelling, digestible content for NorthShore’s social media audience, Rise was able to provide relevant information to their existing audience, as well as leverage that impactful content to grow their following. NorthShore continues to partner with Rise to determine the best social strategy to continue to exceed their campaigns’ goals.
https://www.facebook.com/northshoreweb https://twitter.com/northshoreweb https://www.northshore.org/community/blogs/blog.aspx?blog=3
