Healthcare Marketing: How To Keep Your Facebook Fresh

Any healthcare organization involved with social media is faced with the daily challenge of how to remain fresh and interesting to its community of fans. As a healthcare provider, the purpose of your Facebook page is to develop relationships with current and past patients; their families, friends and co-workers; and physicians and bloggers, as well as to broaden your recognition and expert positioning in the communities you serve. Here are several tips to help you with this process:

1) Engage your fans: It’s important to keep fans engaged and disseminate information of value that they will want to share with others. This will help build your fan base and increase overall community awareness. Don’t take this lightly or dismiss this aspect like so many do. This is the heart and sould of being involved.

When fans respond to and share your posts, you need to show them you truly appreciate their actions by responding to them individually and building on the conversation, offering additional information they might find valuable. Think of it this way – when you are at a cocktail party and someone engages you, you don’t look at them with a blank stare do you? You don’t want to do that on Facebook either.

2) Review your content mix on a monthly basis. Make sure you aren’t just doing the same things over and over, for example, posting news content or information about upcoming community events or your most recent press or blog feed. Change your content with questions or polls, post videos, and even engage your followers in contests. This will require some creative thinking, so you may want to stimulate some ideas by taking a look at what your competitors are doing.

3) Bring your page to life with pictures or videos from events that you attend or sponsor in the communities you serve. The key here is to keep in mind what your fans are looking for and what makes sense for your brand. One example of an event you might want to highlight is a local triathalon.  Another example could be a nutrition and healthy aging event. There are always events taking place that you can encourage others to attend, as well as let them know you plan to be there or even sponsor.

If you want to take things up a notch, the best way to keep your content engaging so that you retain current fans while accumulating new fans and broader community recognition is to develop a Facebook strategy. The output of the strategy should be a month by month activity schedule preferably for a 12-month period.

Developing a strategy is a very complex process because your audience is so demographically diverse in terms of those you want to develop relationships with as I mentioned earlier. You must take into account what your competitors are doing, current marketing and Facebook trends, what makes you better than your competitors, mission statement, positioning, rules for engagement among approved staff members, who will execute it and much more. The strategy needs to integrate traditional Marketing and Public Relations tactics as well to help drive the traffic.

Whether you invest in a strategy or not, the bottom line is engage your fans, change up the content to keep it interesting and bring it to life with real event postings, pictures and video. All of this helps your audience truly connect with you, it establishes your corporate personality and also your “bedside manner.”