There has never been a more misleading term in business than social media.
Healthcare executives have been trained to ask for the ROI of everything, but for some reason they put more focus on this when it comes to social than other traditional forms of media and advertising. Hospitals and health systems aren’t selling mugs or t-shirts so tracing direct business back to social can be tricky. With social marketing this conversation is a little complicated and requires some patience to understand the true return on investment. Confusion has been added by so called “marketing gurus” who have pulled the wool over business owners eyes, having them focus on likes, followers, retweets, and other impressions that simply don’t matter for business. The real value of social is the ability to provide value to your audience and tell the story of what your business does and why you are passionate about it. This creates long-term customers who remain interested in being your consumer for life.
To tackle this issue, we need to understand what social media really means. Social media marketing is focusing where the eyeballs are located. It is just what people are calling storytelling and communicating to your customers in 2015. Your healthcare customers and community are using these platforms, simply because practically everyone in the modern world uses them daily. At one point it was called Web 2.0, or audience building, or online marketing. Tomorrow it might be called full circle platform engagement building or some other crazy term but the basic principles will remain the same.
Social media is a term that stirs up many pre-existing mental associations. For those of us old enough, we remember the days of Friendster or MySpace and think of social as purely a form of entertainment designed to waste time and crush boredom. Others can recall the stories in the media about SnapChat only being used by teenagers to send sexts. If you still have this view of SnapChat, rethink the value for marketing quickly. Others think of Facebook as being unemployed people playing farming and candy crush games all day long. This is simply not true.
As a healthcare executive or business owner, your biggest advantage of investing in social media is that everyone is doing it wrong. So many businesses are still treating social media like a print ad and not branding and communications tools. They are using it as a sales pitch and not providing true value to the audience. The way to stand out in 2015 is to actually provide value and gain the respect of your customers by giving them information they need without the sales pitch.
Marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk is leading the discussion on this topic. When executives of Fortune 500 companies ask him the ROI of social media he has famously responded by asking them what is the ROI of their mother. After a puzzled look, he explains that the ROI of his own mother is everything to him. I believe what he means is that without his mother teaching, educating, caring and supporting him he would be nothing. I believe that the statement is also meant to force the person asking it to wonder why the ROI question comes up more with social than anything else in their businesses.
Vaynerchuk drills it down to the concept that ROI is never about the tool it is about the mechanic using it. If business owners treat it like all the other forms of advertising in the history of selling, they will lose and the ROI will be nothing.
Expectations are so crucial when talking about the ROI for social media. It takes a tremendous amount of time to create content that engages people online. It also takes time to build up a following via word-of-mouth and paid advertising for those platforms. If you are a healthcare group that needs results by the end of this quarter, I suggest that you don’t look at social media to solve your problems. However, if you are looking to build long-term brand equity and trust with your audience, then invest heavily in this area.
In my region of healthcare (hospitals and wound care management) there are many who still don’t fully understand the power of social marketing. One of the things I am most excited about is our recent creation of our Shockwave module of Luvo, a cloud-based management system that powers all wound care operational services into one convenient, easily accessible technology platform. Under Shockwave our team has been managing the social media pages for our hospital partner’s outpatient wound centers. When we help educate partners that social is a long-term strategy to drive patient awareness, we are able to prove to them that the ROI is there. When I am able to connect a referring physician with one of our wound center program directors, that is the ROI of social media. When I am able to connect someone with a non-healing wound with one of our wound centers that can help them heal and possibly save them from amputation, infection and ultimately and untimely death, that is the ROI of social media.
Nothing makes me prouder than the fact that we have been able to do this and prove to hospitals that social media marketing works.
