HEALTHCARE & SOCIAL MEDIA

Dr. Rose Marie Leslie is hoping to reach teens with a message about the dangers of e-cigarettes. So she’s started posting regularly on TikTok, the popular short video app, and has collected a large following.

Leslie, who goes by @DrLeslie and is a family medicine doctor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, has amassed more than 300,000 followers on the platform in recent months. Most of her TikTok videos offer insights on health issues that impact teens, ranging from how to talk to doctors about birth control to why it’s a bad idea for a group of friends to share a lollipop.

She’s best known for getting real about vaping and vaping-related illness. The issue is more urgent than ever for many parents, with surveys showing that vape use at an all-time high among teens amid an outbreak of a life-threatening vaping illness. 

Part of the problem, according to medical experts, is the teens aren’t aware of the risks because public health organizations aren’t communicating with them on the platforms they use.

That’s where Leslie comes in.

Leslie doesn’t talk down to the viewer, but instead shows side-by-side images of a vaping-related lung injury and a normal lung biopsy, and discusses the root causes.

In one video, she shows her followers what vaping lung illness really looks like under a microscope. “That is terrifying,” she says in the video.

Leslie says she gets a lot of messages from teens who have stopped vaping because they watched one of her videos.

“I expected it as a primary-care doctor who’s often talking to teens about the health risks associated with something like vaping that’s perceived as cool,” she said.

Greater engagement on TikTok than other platforms

Leslie is just one of the doctors who have recently started popping up on TikTok. Far more physicians are on Twitter and Instagram, which are more popular with older generations.

But those who have taken the TikToK plunge say they are experiencing far greater engagement on content there than on other social media platforms.

Jefferson Health’s Dr. Austin Chiang, one of the most active physicians on social media, recently joined TikTok after reading about how it’s taking off. 

Chiang uses TikTok primarily as a platform to talk to other young doctors about issues that matter to them, like the cost of medical education or the sacrifice of giving up their 20s to spend nights and weekends in the hospital.

Chiang says he already sees the most engagement on TikTok, which is used by more than 700 million people daily, according to its owner ByteDance.

Chiang and Leslie are also using TikTok to combat health misinformation.

“I’ve heard the criticism that doctors and other medical professionals on social media are somehow less credible, or won’t be taken as seriously by their peers,” said Sherry Pagoto, a behavioral scientist and professor at the Department of Allied Health Sciences at the University of Connecticut. “But I think that school of thought is going to be a thing of the past.”

Pagoto notes that medical experts need to meet teens where they are, rather than sticking to the older methods of advertising on television or Facebook.

“It would be great for public health organizations to follow the lead of these medical professionals on TikTok,” she said.

Read More: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/29/doctors-use-tiktok-to-talk-to-teens-about-vaping-birth-control.html

Healthcare social media marketing has evolved significantly over the past decade.

Gone are the days of social media managers posting the same or similar content across one, two, or three social media profiles and calling it a day.

Given the importance of social media in healthcare, the team at Convince & Convert wanted to identify common trends across social media marketing from the top U.S. hospitals.

Our New Healthcare Social Media Research

Convince & Convert reviewed all Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube public posts from January 1 – March 31, 2019, by 54 of the top U.S. hospitals, as determined by bed count and the 2018–19 Best Hospitals Honor Roll.

We used Rival IQ for content aggregation and in-depth competitive analysis of all 54 hospitals’ social media efforts. We gathered insights into how hospitals use private messaging by directly interacting with hospital Facebook pages through Messenger.

We also ranked the Top 20 Hospitals in Social Media based on a ranking score that includes Audience Size, Engagement, Engagement Rate Per Post and Total Posts.

The 4 Best Practices for Healthcare Social Media Marketing in 2020

Here are the 4 best practices of healthcare social media marketing that will help you set your strategy in the right direction this upcoming year.

1. Diversify Your Channel Mix Beyond Facebook and Twitter

Our research found that hospitals post on Instagram less than once every two days, but publish to Twitter and Facebook at least twice per day on each channel. Based on posting frequency, Instagram and YouTube are as secondary channels, despite these audiences being more engaged.

2. Vary Your Content Mix to Optimize Audience Actions

More than half of the best-performing posts included photos of people. Twenty-seven of the best 50 posts clearly showed the faces of people or babies.

In addition, curated content links have higher engagement: 35% of links shared by hospitals are curated, meaning they are not from the hospital’s own domain. Posts with curated links earned an average of 0.033% engagement per post, while links originating from the hospital’s own domain generated half as much engagement, at 0.015%.

3. Boost Top Performing Posts Organic Posts

While engagement is trending down across social media as a whole, brands are circumventing declining organic reach by spending money to ensure their content is getting seen.

In fact, 5.5% of all hospital Facebook posts we analyzed are signaled as “likely-boosted”, according to Rival IQ. Of those likely-boosted Facebook posts, the engagement rate per post was 177% higher than the non-boosted posts.

4. Connect with Niche Communities

While Facebook Brand Pages continue to be used by patients and hospitals, some hospitals are beginning to leverage Facebook Groups and Messenger to create deeper connections with audiences. 

In fact, 30% of the top U.S. hospitals are making Groups part of their Facebook strategy. Twelve of the 54 hospitals (22%) are currently or have recently used Groups as part of their Facebook outreach.

Social media marketing is the present and the future is returning to a one-on-one approach of engaging with audiences directly, be it in a private message or in response to a recommendation. Users are eschewing the spotlight in favor of smaller, niche communities where their presence is valued and they are not just a number.

Read More: https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-marketing/healthcare-social-media-marketing/ 

Twitter can serve as a dashboard indicator of a community’s psychological well-being and can predict county-level rates of heart disease, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of theAssociation for Psychological Science.

Previous studies have identified many factors that contribute to the risk of heart disease, including behavioral factors like smoking and psychological factors like stress.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated that Twitter can capture more information about heart disease risk than many traditional factors combined, as it also characterizes the psychological atmosphere of a community.

The findings show that expressions of negative emotions such as anger, stress, and fatigue in the tweets from people in a given county were associated with higher heart disease risk in that county. On the other hand, expressions of positive emotions like excitement and optimism were associated with lower risk.

The results suggest that using Twitter as a window into a community’s collective mental state may provide a useful tool in epidemiology:

Monitoring social media websites like Twitter could help health officials and providers identify in real time severe medical outbreaks, allowing them to more efficiently direct resources and curb the spread of disease, according to a San Diego State University studypublished last month in the Journal of Medical Internet Research,Medical News Today reports.

Study Details

For the study, lead researcher and San Diego State University geography professor Ming-Hsiang Tsou and his team used a program to monitor tweets that originated within a 17-mile radius of 11 cities. The program recorded details of tweets containing the words "flu" or "influenza," including:

• Origin;
• Username;
• Whether the tweet was an original or a retweet; and
• Any links to websites in the tweet.

Researchers then compared their findings with regional data based on CDC's definition of influenza-like illness.