Healthcare Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

Are you struggling to make healthcare social media marketing work for your clients?

You’re not alone. 

Social media marketing can be a powerful approach to strengthening your clients’ brand credibility, boosting patient engagement, and driving appointments. 

The challenge? Effective social media marketing takes more than sharing an Instagram Story or LinkedIn post daily.

You need the right strategies, tools, and best practices to help your clients connect with their patients online and drive engagement and conversions. 

Unsure of where to start? This guide has you covered.

We’ll cover the essentials of healthcare social media marketing, including the top tips and tools for ensuring success. 

What you will learn

• What is healthcare social media marketing?
• What are the benefits of healthcare social media marketing?
• What are the top tips for healthcare social media marketing?
• How to use Vista Social for healthcare social media marketing
• What should you avoid in healthcare social media marketing?
• What are the healthcare social media marketing FAQs?
• Ready to get your healthcare social media marketing off the ground?
  

What is healthcare social media marketing?

Healthcare social media marketing is a marketing approach that uses social networks to engage patients online, build trust, and promote services. 

Generally, healthcare social media marketing aims to create relevant and meaningful content that helps address audience and patient needs. 

Healthcare social media marketing can bridge the gap between your clients and their patients through more approachable and personal methods, ultimately driving engagement.

What are the benefits of healthcare social media marketing?

Social media can offer the following perks for your clients in the healthcare industry. 

1. Understand knowledge gaps among audiences

One of the best ways to help your clients connect better with their patients online is to post content on what their audiences want to learn more about. 

It’s also a great opportunity to clarify any misinformation about your brand, services, or the healthcare industry. 

Learn from your clients’ audiences directly by asking questions in the comments or creating engaging Facebook posts or Instagram Story polls. 

Consider diving into follower conversations about specific topics or trends in the comments section. 

You can do this easily with Vista Social. 

The social media management platform’s social listening tool lets you set up listeners that track and pull conversations around your specified topics or keywords. 

The social media listening feature can track conversations within your clients’ social profiles to help you uncover valuable insights and industry gaps. 

You can leverage the information to understand audience sentiment and create content that addresses their pain points and resonates with followers. 

Must read: Social Media Sentiment Analysis: A Comprehensive Guide

2. Build trust with patients 

A healthcare provider-patient relationship centers around trust. 

The right social media marketing strategies can help your clients build trust with current and potential patients. 

For instance, you can share patient success stories or positive testimonials across your clients’ social media pages. 

It can humanize your clients’ brands while providing valuable content that fosters patient and follower trust. 

3. Support the hiring process

Social media marketing can effectively attract the right medical professionals to work for your clients. 

You can run social media ads and create content to help your clients promote their job openings and draw in potential hires.

For instance, you can leverage social media for the following:

• Publish a recruitment post on your clients’ social media pages, such as LinkedIn, with links to their application forms or pages
• Post content on real employee experiences, including what it’s like to work for your clients in a behind-the-scenes or a day-in-the-life TikTok video or Instagram Reel to encourage applications

4. Improve patient relationships

Social media platforms provide a highly accessible and easy-to-use space for real-time communication between your clients and their patients. 

The platforms help your clients connect better with their patients by responding to patient concerns via Direct Messages (DMs) or answering quick questions in the comments. 

The interactions allow your clients to build stronger, more personal relationships and nurture trust and loyalty, which impacts patient satisfaction and retention. 

Must read: Social Media Interaction Post Ideas This 2022

What are the top tips for healthcare social media marketing?

Learn from the tried-and-true tips below to ensure effective, efficient, and compliant social media marketing for your clients’ healthcare practice or services. 

Develop a social media protocol

Your clients’ social media marketing efforts should never invade patient privacy and violate applicable laws and regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

That is why establishing social media guidelines and protocols is crucial.

Must read: Social Media Guidelines: How to Create One for Your Team

The guidelines help keep your clients’ social media posts, interactions, and other activities above board and compliant with laws and regulations. 

When developing your social media guidelines and protocols, consult with your clients’ legal and PR teams to ensure you cover everything. 

Also, develop a system and assign a point person to manage and respond to negative comments and reviews on your clients’ social media pages. 

A solid protocol can act as a playbook that helps your clients use social media responsibly and diligently. 

It keeps their social media efforts compliant, avoiding potential privacy or legal issues that can hurt their brands’ reputations.  

Must read: How to Build a Social Media Playbook (For Agencies)

Establish thought leadership by combating misinformation

Information often spreads like wildfire on social media. 

The catch is that the information isn’t always true or accurate, which can be dangerous, especially when it’s health or healthcare-related. 

As healthcare providers, your clients can demonstrate expertise and thought leadership by fighting misinformation and posting relevant, meaningful, and fact-based content. 

For example, when posting educational or informational content, cite credible sources such as reputable news outlets or published research papers and studies. 

This way, you ensure that your clients only share accurate and reliable health information or content that promotes good health behaviors. 

It can position your clients as go-to sources for trustworthy health information to their social media audiences. 

It also helps strengthen their credibility, fostering trust and boosting patient engagement and conversions. 

Leverage social media to educate audiences

Healthcare social media marketing goes beyond promoting your clients’ brands and services. 

If you want your clients to connect and build relationships with their audiences effectively, offer content that educates them and gives them valuable information. 

The social media marketing strategy can be a win-win for your clients and their followers. 

Audiences can learn from the meaningful and educational content. At the same time, your clients become sources of useful information, which puts their brands in a positive light.  

Weave educational content into your clients’ social media marketing strategies by doing the following:

• Spreading information about critical medical and health issues
• Sharing infographics or other visual content to make complex health information simpler and more digestible 
• Jumping into relevant awareness campaigns and social media conversations around current topics and trends within the healthcare industry
• Posting content that encourages and inspires your clients’ audiences to improve their health and quality of life

Educating your clients’ audiences on social media can help them build trust and long-lasting relationships with their consumers while drawing attention to their brands. 

Showcase your team

People connect better with other people, making humanizing your clients’ brands on social media crucial. 

One way of humanizing your clients’ brands is to showcase the people behind your company: Doctors, nurses, administrative staff, paramedics, and other employees. 

These front-liners are the people who deal with your patients daily and are, therefore, the faces of your clients’ organizations.   

Share content about their skills, experiences, and achievements. 

Include pictures showing them in action, such as participating in community activities or events or helping patients (without violating patient privacy and applicable regulations). 

Featuring your clients’ employees adds a human touch to their brands, making them more relatable and credible to their followers and communities. 

Additional tip: Run an employee advocacy program and have your clients’ staff promote their healthcare practices or services on their personal social media pages. 

Use Vista Social’s employee advocacy feature to manage and implement your clients’ program and marketing efforts seamlessly. 

Focus on specific social media platforms

Running social media campaigns on multiple platforms can take a lot of time, energy, and resources. 

Don’t overreach and focus your social media marketing efforts on your clients’ critical platforms. 

After all, you don’t want to overextend yourself and fail to deliver your clients’ expected results. 

Choose two to three social media platforms that drive the most results to focus your time and resources on. 

For instance, if your client gets significant engagement and conversions on LinkedIn and Facebook, pour your efforts into those platforms. 

Don’t try to do it all.

Instead, focus on your clients’ platforms and marketing efforts that help them reach their healthcare social media marketing goals.  

How to use Vista Social for healthcare social media marketing

Healthcare social media marketing can be challenging, but using the best tool increases your chances of succeeding.

Enter Vista Social, a sophisticated social media management platform with features that streamline and supercharge your core tasks, from post scheduling to analytics. 

Creating and scheduling content for auto-posting is quick and easy with the platform’s social media publishing feature.

Use the AI Assistant to generate custom and engaging captions and taglines for your posts. 

You can also use it to refine your written captions based on your clients’ brand voice and tone.

After creating and customizing your post, you can schedule it to auto-publish on optimal times and dates. 

Vista Social suggests optimal posting times based on your clients’ engagement data and optimization algorithms to ensure maximum engagement. 

What’s more, you can boost your clients’ scheduled, unscheduled, and even published posts to get more eyeballs on the content. 

Set up your boost configuration and enable and select it when scheduling or publishing your clients’ posts.

The platform’s social media engagement feature lets you stay on top of patient or follower Direct Messages (DMs), comments, mentions, and reviews. 

It features a smart Social Inbox that unifies all your clients’ social media interactions per profile to simplify managing, viewing, and responding to them promptly.

Fun fact: The AI Assistant in the Social Inbox can generate suggested responses to your clients’ comments, reviews, and messages, saving you time and effort.

The Social Inbox helps ensure your clients don’t miss opportunities to interact with and engage their potential patients and followers. 

Another awesome tool is the platform’s social media analytics and reporting feature. 

It can track, measure, and analyze your clients’ content performance, giving you actionable insights to inform and improve your social media strategies. 

Must read: How to Create Automated Social Media Reports

The platform lets you create custom reports and schedule them to auto-generate and share with your clients and other users.

You can also share the reports directly with a link to make sharing and accessing them easier.

Important note: Vista Social’s Social Media Performance Report now includes a grid view for your selected profiles. 

The option gives you a quick picture of your clients’ top-level metrics so you can compare them side by side.

Make the most of your clients’ social media marketing momentum. Generate and capture leads with Vista Page, a link in bio tool with customizable landing pages.

Customize your client’s landing page accordingly. 

You can set the theme, add texts and images, and include more lead generation and conversion elements, such as calendars for booking appointments via Calendly.  

Once the page is up, you can copy its URL and add it to your client’s Instagram, TikTok, and other social media bio. 

Additionally, you can manage your client’s reputation with Vista Social’s review management feature.

It tracks and pulls all your clients’ reviews across platforms such as Yelp and Google Business in one space, and you can respond to them quickly via the Social Inbox. 

The feature includes your clients’ review data to help you understand trends and identify crucial reviews. 

Must read: When to Automate Social Media

Don’t miss out on Vista Social’s other handy features, including the following:

• Automated post approval workflows
• A content calendar
• AI-powered hashtag generator
• Profile management tools
• Team and user management features
• Social media username (handle) generator

Must read: Social Media Handles: How to Pick And Create One

What should you avoid in healthcare social media marketing?

Healthcare social media marketing generally follows stricter rules and compliance regulations, making it crucial to know what to avoid so your clients don’t get in trouble.  

Must read: Outsourcing Social Media Marketing: A Guide for Agencies

Using outdated terms and phrases

Failing to use the most current medical terms and language in your clients’ social media content can unintentionally imply judgment or bias. 

For example, referring to substance use disorders using stigmatizing language can alienate your clients’ potential patients. 

Your best bet is to learn and stay updated on using science-based language, such as this resource from the National Institute of Health (NIH). 

Sharing patient stories that include identifying information

Remember, sharing confidential patient information violates HIPAA regulations, which can ruin your clients’ reputations or even land them in legal hot waters. 

While your clients may not do this intentionally, some patient information can slip through without a thorough content review. 

For instance, a simple photo shared on Facebook could capture the patient’s name in the background. 

If you’re unsure whether your client’s post is anonymous enough or clear of identifying information, err on the side of caution and avoid sharing it.  

Misleading ads

Healthcare advertisements follow stricter rules than consumer ads. 

To ensure compliance, check your clients’ social media ads before running them for unclear, inaccurate, or misleading information, even by omission. 

What are the healthcare social media marketing FAQs?

Which social media platform is best for healthcare providers?

It depends on your clients’ goals and target audiences. 

Ideally, your clients should focus their efforts on the social media platforms where they’re making the most impact and getting significant results, such as more engagement and conversions. 

Why is social media important to your health communications strategy?

Using social media for healthcare communication allows your clients to provide health information, answer basic medical questions, and facilitate dialogue with potential patients.

It can also help your clients gather opinions and feedback to improve service quality and patient experiences. 

How can you use social media to promote health?

Healthcare providers and organizations can leverage social media to share educational content that raises awareness of medical conditions, encourages healthy habits, and busts common myths.

Other content you can share includes exercise tips, nutrition, preventative care, and mental health. 

Use various content types and formats that resonate best with target audiences, from live Q&As to visually appealing and helpful infographics. 

Ready to get your healthcare social media marketing off the ground?

Healthcare social media marketing isn’t a walk in the park. 

However, knowing the essentials, using the best tools, and developing a winning strategy can position your social media marketing efforts for success. 

Learn the tips and tricks and leverage Vista Social for your social media management needs.

Create your Vista Social account now.