Mayo Clinic’s ’Facebook’ grows to 7,000 users, new features coming

Mayo Clinic’s 13-week-old version of Facebook has cracked 7,100 users, and the healthcare-social-media-heavy hospital system is promising new features next month.

More than 1,000 people joined the free online health community when it launched on July 5. Lee Aase, director for Mayo’s Center for Social Media, said Mayo hoped to gather 5,000 users by year’s end.

“We are continually revising our goal. I think we’d like to have 10,000 by the end of the year,” Aase said. “I think we’re well on pace to surpass that.”

Mayo said in July it launched its own social network because it wanted control over design, content and site policies it didn’t have with its Facebook page. Still, Mayo’s site holds only a fraction of the members its Facebook page (61,300) and Twitter account (239,303) have.

Users on the Mayo Clinic social network spend an average of nearly five minutes on the site and access more than 6 pages per visit. While the most popular area for activity is discussions.

Aase said he’s learned how to manage the Mayo social network from watching the hospital’s Facebook page. “What we’ve appreciated is that there’s an appetite for people to go and have health-related discussions in a place that wasn’t Facebook,” he said, adding: “It’s commercial-free environments that I think people appreciate.”

Aase said they’ve so far only made minor tweaks, such as changes to discussion links that now make it clearer which topic users are on. A new feature will be launched sometime in October, he added.

Chris Boyer, director of digital marketing at Inova Health System, said the real success for the site will be if patients find information that will help them manage their care or seek out or find healthcare research that they didn’t have before.

“I know that the Mayo Clinic also looks at interaction and engagement of patients as a secondary measure, but I think finding information is the ultimate measurement,” Boyer said.

“With a name like Mayo Clinic, they have enough name recognition, which makes it easier to launch a community that will have international impact,” Boyer added. “I don’t think that the majority of hospitals could do that because they don’t have such international name recognition behind them. Smaller hospitals launching an online community would have much more limited success because they do not have the brand of Mayo Clinic.”