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Social Media Marketing for Healthcare: The 5 Step Plan
You’ve likely seen social media posts about critically ill patients overcoming life-threatening diseases. Stories like these resonate deeply, striking an emotional chord and leaving a lasting impression.
Healthcare companies are increasingly using social media to share patient success stories and win customer share of mind.
And it’s working!
57% of consumers say that social media "strongly influences" their healthcare choices. The impact of social media on how people choose healthcare providers and services is undeniable.
Patients are turning to online platforms to read reviews, watch testimonials and gather information before making decisions about which hospital or provider to choose. As competition rises, healthcare providers are also using social media to differentiate themselves and win patients’ trust.
In 2024, healthcare providers are not just medical practitioners — they’re also storytellers, influencers and thought leaders. And social media is where their stories are unfolding.
However, navigating the world of social media marketing can be challenging for healthcare professionals. In this blog, we’ll talk about the latest social media trends, explore success stories and understand the legal implications of social media for healthcare professionals.
What is social media for healthcare?
Social media for healthcare is the strategic use of social media by healthcare providers to engage with patients, share health and wellness tips, promote medical services, and build a trusted social brand for sustainable growth.
Healthcare professionals can use social media to nurture deeper connections with their audience and empower patients by sharing information on topics such as disease prevention and revolutionary treatments.
For instance, the sentiment analysis of 902,138 tweets (or X posts) between March 20 and April 19, 2020, revealed that healthcare professionals leveraged social media during the COVID pandemic to share credible information, promote preventive measures, and deliver the latest updates.
Related Read: What is social media sentiment analysis?
How social media is reshaping the healthcare industry
Social media is reshaping the healthcare industry, offering new ways to engage, educate and support patients. Here are a few inspiring examples:
1. Dr. Tyler Hanks
Dr. Hanks, a pediatric dentist in Salt Lake City, uses Instagram to build trust by sharing tips on children's dental care, common patient issues and best practices for maintaining good dental health.
He uses humor and vibrant visuals to engage and attract local families. His strategic focus on content quality has resulted in 199K Instagram followers.
2. Harvard Health
Harvard Health is the consumer health education division of Harvard Medical School. It smartly uses its Harvard affiliation to win audience trust and boost its social media presence. Harvard Health does this by strategically using hashtags in social posts to drive higher engagement and visibility.
With 68% of parents turning to social media for health information, Harvard Health has effectively capitalized on this strategy. By disseminating research insights and addressing misinformation, they have established themselves as a reliable source of health information.
3. Dr. Mike Varshavski
Dr. Mike Varshavski, who’s also known as “Dr. Mike,” is a family medicine physician who has skyrocketed in popularity on Instagram, amassing millions of followers. His success stems from blending health education with a relatable, engaging persona.
Dr. Mike uses a mix of informative posts, fitness content and light-hearted glimpses into his personal life to connect with his audience, making complex medical topics accessible while building trust and growing his influence.
Read More: Guide on Social Media Content Creation
Why has social media become essential in healthcare?
Social media is changing how healthcare providers and patients connect, bringing medical information and support directly to consumers. Here are the key advantages of social media in the healthcare industry:
Drives organic growth
73% of patients rely on digital reviews before selecting a healthcare professional. Social media is the perfect place for healthcare audiences to find patient testimonials and health tips, and social media provides a platform for building trust and credibility, which in turn drives organic growth.
Consistent engagement helps healthcare providers establish a loyal following and attract new patients without the need for paid advertising.
Related: Check out types of social media content that work best
Establishes brand authority
Healthcare professionals also use social media to establish themselves as thought leaders and attract patients seeking specialized care.
Look at Rose Ingleton, for example. Her influence on social media and the loyalty of her digital community propelled her namesake brand to win the Byrdie 2022 Eco Beauty Award. A robust online presence can enhance brand visibility and drive business success.
Mitigates panic and public anxiety
Social media becomes an essential tool for healthcare organizations in times of crisis. During the coronavirus outbreak, WHO leveraged social platforms to reassure people, disseminate accurate information and deliver real-time updates on the evolving situation.
Healthcare organizations can use social media to reduce misinformation, ease public anxiety and ensure that communities stay informed with actionable advice during emergencies.
Builds a positive brand image
The healthcare industry relies on trust between healthcare providers and patients. It leverages social media to build brand awareness and create a positive perception. So, brands must develop their social messaging around their mission and values.
Have a look at March of Dimes’ social media strategy — it publishes content that seamlessly aligns with its commitment to improving the health of mothers and newborns. By sharing positive experiences and stories across 4,400 Instagram posts, they have garnered 80.2K followers.
Creates care communities
Social chatrooms, DMs and groups provide spaces for patients to connect, share experiences and offer mutual support. These online communities are valuable for those seeking information, advice and emotional support.
For example, the Cancer Survivor Network has 28.5K topics with 312.5K comments on its breast cancer thread. This community allows cancer patients, survivors, caregivers, families and friends to share experiences and exchange information.
Social media regulations in healthcare
In the healthcare industry, compliance with legal regulations on social media is critical. Key regulations to consider are:
- HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act): HIPAA safeguards the privacy and security of patients' health information to prevent Protected Health Information (PHI) from being disclosed without explicit patient consent.
- FDA (Food and Drug Administration): The FDA provides guidelines for monitoring social media content promoting medical products and services.
Even unintentional disclosures of PHI can lead to HIPAA violations. For instance, inadvertently tagging a patient’s photo in a social media post can reveal their identity, constituting a HIPAA violation. Or imagine a healthcare company posting about a new drug on social media, claiming it cures a condition without mentioning the side effects. This violates FDA rules by misleading the public.
🏆 Best Practices:
To uphold compliance with HIPAA and FDA regulations in healthcare social media:
🔄 Update your social media policies regularly to ensure compliance with current regulations.
📚 Educate your staff about using social media in compliance with regulations and guidelines, such as FDA rules for health claims and maintaining transparency about sponsored content.
🕵️Conduct social media audits to track compliance issues such as unintentional PHI disclosures in your posts.
🩺 Adhere to FDA regulations for promoting medical products by recommending only approved uses and disclosing associated risks.
💡 Pro Tip: Need help doing this? Try Sprinklr’s AI-powered smart compliance solution.
It enables you to:
🚩 Flag content containing PHI, allowing you to address privacy concerns promptly.
📋 Use your team guidelines and rules to identify any misaligned messaging.
⚖️ Measure the compliance of your content with AI-powered reporting.
Social media strategy for healthcare: 5 Steps
Social media gives healthcare providers a powerful tool to connect with patients. However, navigating the endless number of platforms and best practices can be challenging.
Here are five key steps to help you create an effective social media strategy from scratch:
Step 1: Define your goals
Ask yourself – as a healthcare organization, what are your social media goals? Are you looking to increase patient engagement, elevate brand reputation or drive traffic to your website? Clearly defining these goals will help tailor your strategy and measure success effectively.
🏆 Best Practices:
Set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals. For instance, your social media goal could be to increase patient engagement on your hospital's Instagram account by 20% within the next quarter. So your goal should be:
🎯 Specific: The goal specifies the metric (engagement) and the platform (Instagram).
📊 Measurable: The target (20% increase) is quantified.
✅ Achievable: A 20% increase in engagement is established as a realistic target.
🔗 Relevant: The goal will help you build a robust online community.
📅 Time-bound: The deadline (next quarter) is defined.
Step 2: Know your audience
Understand whom you are trying to reach. Are you targeting patients, healthcare professionals or the general public? Then, create detailed customer personas to understand your audience's needs, interests and preferences.
Imagine Emily (a 45-year-old mother seeking health tips online) — share family-friendly health posts for her. Or Dr. Adams (a 36-year-old physician looking for the latest medical advancements) — share educational articles for him.
🏆 Best Practices:
🎯 Tailor your social media post based on audience targeting. Create content that resonates with specific customer personas, such as patients seeking information, caregivers looking for support and healthcare professionals seeking industry insights.
📑 Utilize social media analytics, surveys, and customer feedback to understand your audience preferences. Use this information to modify your content.
🕵️ Monitor the latest social media trends to publish content that impacts your audience. For instance, share tips for managing seasonal illnesses if you notice increased discussions about flu season or allergy outbreaks.
Step 3: Choose the right platform
Not all social media platforms are created equal. Leverage Sprinklr audience insights to identify platforms where your target communities are most active. Customize your content to align with the social media platforms you’re using. For instance, share health tips and patient testimonials on Instagram and post industry insights and professional achievements on LinkedIn.
🏆 Best Practices:
📜 Review the platform’s terms of use to ensure they align with healthcare industry regulations on patient data confidentiality, such as HIPAA and FDA.
🕵️ Conduct a strategic competitive analysis to assess the engagement of other healthcare brands on the platform and identify areas of improvement.
💰 Assess each platform's cost-effectiveness and potential ROI, leveraging an ROI estimator to allocate your online marketing budget.
Look at Whoop, for instance. Its unique voice and visual content make Instagram the ideal platform for this health and fitness brand, helping it attract over 1.2 million followers.
Step 4: Create customer-centric content
Want to keep your audience engaged? Start by creating a social media content calendar that includes a range of content types.
To effectively engage your audience, focus on what they enjoy and adjust your content plan accordingly. For example, share infographics on managing chronic conditions for patients and offer tutorial videos on medication administration or understanding lab results for healthcare professionals.
🏆 Best Practices:
🎨 Publish visually appealing and informative content that aligns with your customers’ preferences. Focus on topics and content formats that drive maximum interaction.
📊 Track post performance to identify content that resonates most with your customers. Based on your customer engagement metrics, update your content plan.
📝 Use clear, simple language and avoid complex medical jargon to avoid overwhelming customers with limited health literacy.
Step 5: Develop a social media workflow
Developing a social media workflow helps your healthcare brand manage its online presence effectively. To create engaging and relevant content, brainstorm ideas around topics trending in the healthcare industry and produce assets based on these ideas. Create checkpoints for editing, reviewing and revising your content to ensure quality and compliance with HIPAA regulations.
🏆 Best Practices:
🧑🤝🧑Develop a workflow that factors in the time required to engage with your audience and respond promptly to comments, messages and mentions.
🛠️ Leverage social media management tools to schedule posts, track analytics, manage multiple accounts and collaborate with team members.
🚨 Include a crisis management plan in your workflow to minimize the damage to your brand from negative feedback. This can help you handle situations like a major healthcare product recall or a public relations mishap.
Social media tips and tools for healthcare
Social media in healthcare boosts patient engagement, streamlines communication and enhances service delivery. Here are key tips and useful tools to help you succeed:
1. Activate social listening for patient insights
Gain a competitive edge by leveraging social listening to discover the latest information, such as emerging healthcare topics and treatment options. By monitoring online conversations, healthcare professionals can understand their patients, identify their needs and respond to public health concerns.
💡 Pro Tip: Want to stand out as a healthcare brand? Start by listening to what your audience is saying. Monitor social media conversations and identify pain points, such as confusion over insurance coverage or delays in delivering diagnostic results, with Sprinklr’s social listening tool.
This solution allows you to:
📈 Access historical and real-time data on patient experiences and public health concerns.
🔍 Identify top themes and trends, such as wearable health tech and remote patient monitoring.
⚖️ Compare social performance and influencer presence against other healthcare brands.
2. Create a solid hashtag strategy
Modern solutions stack research and identify hashtags to help you connect with your target audience. How? An Instagram Hashtag Manager tool can help you identify hashtags based on popularity, trend and relevance. Some tools even automate hashtag creation based on your domain.
For example, look at the hashtag #ChicagoHealth. It has been embedded in 32K Instagram posts and 11K Facebook posts. Any Chicago healthcare brand or pharmaceutical company can leverage this hashtag to connect with the local community.
Want to get even more creative? Encourage user-generated content from your patients with a hashtag campaign like OhioHealth's #OhioHealthBabies. Such initiatives boost engagement and build a sense of community around your brand.
Dive Deeper: How to find the hashtags that actually work
3. Conduct market analysis for competitive benchmarking
Thorough market analysis is crucial for achieving social media goals, such as entering new markets, gaining deeper customer insights or outperforming competitors. Social media technology can significantly enhance this process. Leveraging social media analytics tools, competitive benchmarking can reveal gaps and uncover unmet market needs.
For instance, McDonald’s used Sprinklr’s benchmarking tool to analyze data from about 300 social accounts, giving them a competitive edge. They shared insights through custom reports with their global team, helping to build a strong brand health engine.
Also, keep an eye on emerging trends and technological innovations in healthcare. Look at Kaiser Permanente, for example. The company has effectively integrated electronic health records (EHR) and telehealth services, demonstrating how digital health technologies can streamline the delivery of quality healthcare.
💡 Pro Tip: Maximize your social media impact by understanding your competition. Use a competitive insights and benchmarking tool to track your competitors’ social performance across multiple channels.
With it, you can:
📈 Monitor the best-performing posts by top healthcare brands to identify the preferences of your target audience.
📊 Evaluate your engagement, reach and follower count against leading healthcare brands and professionals.
🔔 Set up alerts to receive updates on any changes to your key metrics, such as a sudden spike or drop in your social media engagement.
4. Track your social media performance
Instead of obsessing over follower counts, focus on engagement. Shares, saves, and retweet rates offer a more accurate picture of your content's real impact. For example, a wellness brand can leverage A/B testing to identify CTAs that deliver the best results.
Use heatmap analysis to gain in-depth insights into how your audience interacts with your content. This data helps healthcare professionals see which page elements attract the most attention, allowing for targeted improvements to enhance the user experience.
Start your healthcare social media assessment
When 7% of Google searches are about healthcare and 92% of US healthcare marketers use Instagram, there’s no doubt that social media is key to reaching patients. However, managing a successful social media strategy without the right tools can be daunting.
That's where Sprinklr Social steps in. By automating tasks like social media publishing, monitoring brand sentiment and leveraging user-generated content, the platform frees up your time to focus on what truly matters: meaningful engagement and broader marketing goals.
Case in point: Dignity Health. The healthcare service provider used Sprinklr to reduce customer response time by 14 hours in just a year by harnessing Sprinklr’s advanced analytics and social listening capabilities.
Ready to unlock the potential of social media for your healthcare organization?
Frequently Asked Questions
While the best platform depends on your specific goals and audience, some popular options for the healthcare sector include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter).
Track key metrics such as website traffic, lead generation, conversions, engagement rates and brand mentions. Use analytics tools to measure the impact of your social media campaigns and identify areas for improvement.
Social media can be a valuable tool for disseminating accurate information, addressing concerns and coordinating response efforts during crises. Monitor social media conversations, respond to questions promptly and provide clear and consistent messaging.
Respond to negative comments promptly and professionally. Publicly addressing negative feedback demonstrates your commitment to customer satisfaction and can help mitigate damage to your reputation.
