Planning a Social Media site for Healthcare Audiences

Social Media in Healthcare is a topic that many health organizations are trying to make sense of now. The main problem health organizations have with social media has little to do about the technology, but more about how social media can be applied to communicate valuable information to members while obeying HIPAA privacy regulations. If you are a healthcare organization you may want to consider the following outline for planning your social media site.

Create a policy
Before you start planning a social media presence you should work with your communications, compliance, human resources, security and legal departments to create a policy for your organization. I have listed some great references out there to social media policies to give you a running start. At this step it might also make sense to create templates for what options you will enable and disable for each social media site to ensure all of your sites are consistent.

Steps for creating a social media site

Define your audience
First; you should determine who you want to communicate with. For example if you want to communicate with a member community you may want to provide the text in multiple languages and ensure that the content is written for the appropriate grade level.

Define your engagement strategy
Next, you should determine how you want to interact with your audience. Healthcare organizations will want to spend a significant amount of time planning their engagement strategy. Some questions you may want to consider:

- Are you here to listen, talk or a little of both?

- Will you only push communication to your audience? If so, what is the effectiveness of a push campaign? What kind of information do you intend to push?

- If you are listening can your audience post questions and will the questions be answered on the social media site? How do you ensure your responses are consistent and reviewed by all the right people? Will you dedicate resources to monitoring social media websites so you can reply timely to comments?

- How can Healthcare organizations ensure that their audience does not post Personal Health Information (PHI) on social media websites? Will you post a disclaimer somewhere? How does your legal department feel about this?

Determine your success criteria and how you will measure from the beginning
Everyone want to build a social media web site for some reason. Hopefully that reason is more than, "our competitors are doing it." Before you move forward with your social media campaign it is important to define what success means for your campaign and how you are going to measure success. Some examples of success criteria and measurements are:

- Achieve 500 Facebook Fans by the end of Q1. Goal is measured using Facebook's analytics.

- Increase referral traffic from Facebook page by x%. Goal is measured using web analytics software.

- Improved health outcomes of members. Goal is measured by tracking members that are fans of your pages and health improvements since becoming a fan. This can be difficult to measure if your systems are not well designed.

Without defining success criteria up front your organization may end up spending a lot of time and money with little return on investment.

Plan your communications
Most healthcare organizations are required at minimum to have internal reviews of their content; some organizations like Medicaid require state approvals before using content. Planning your communication early allows you to get all the necessary approvals and plan for seasonal communications like Flu reminders in the winter or tips about covering up at the beach during summer months. Work with your communications and compliance teams to ensure that your communications are high value but that they also meet HIPAA and state regulations.

Vary each channel
The saying "variety is the spice of life" holds true when it comes to communicating your message to various audiences. Think of your organization's communication like TV channels. We tune into a specific channel because we get specific value. For example, a sports channel like ESPN might provide excitement and suspense, where a channel like the History channel will stimulate your mind. This same idea holds true when it comes to your company's communications channels (portals, web site, email marketing, social media and text message campaigns). Do not just copy the same message you wrote for your web site and post it on Facebook, Twitter and other sites? Users need to have a reason to become a fan or follow you. What is the value of being a member of one or all if you regurgitate the same message on each channel?

Create the page or account
Create a corporate account for managing your social media pages. The last thing you want to worry about is one of your staff leaving the organization and trying to hijack your social media site. Use the configuration defined in the policy stage to setup options like comments and available features. If you spend time up front getting these configurations blessed by your compliance and legal teams it will save you time turning up social media sites.

Test it out
Get some of your staff to become fans of the social media web site before you announce it on your website. Check the site for any misspellings and that you have not missed any details.

Pick a good name
Select a good name for your Facebook / Twitter page. Example if you are a health organization you may want to create a page with a URL like http://www.facebook.com/healthcompanyname. Twitter allows you to pick a name immediately where Facebook requires you to have 25 fans before locking in your URL. Make sure your page name is something that applies to the topic. Page titles are indexed by search engines and jargon and cute marketing terms may hurt your campaign.

Let people know you are out there
Once you have completed your social media project advertise it through newsletters, email and your web site.

That is what I think, what do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.