How to Maximize Your Hospital’s Facebook Page

INTRODUCTION

Does your hospital’s Facebook page have no purpose beyond “we should be on Facebook?” Are you following some undefined strategy of so-called “online branding?” Or, do you have reasons to be on Facebook, yet your objectives aren’t being met?

While you are probably tempted to fulfill a myriad of needs through your Facebook page, you are best served focusing on a few clear-cut purposes, all under the umbrella of customer (patient) retention.  

Here are three ways your hospital can maximize its Facebook page.

BUILD RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE COMMUNITY

These days, it’s even more important to build engagement with the community because the Affordable Care Act requires tax-exempt hospitals to perform a community health needs assessment every three years.

To complete the community health needs assessment, you should survey community stakeholders through Facebook–e.g. create a survey and then boost the post that links to it–aggregate the data and then implement a plan to meet the community’s top needs.

One likely way you’ll be meeting those needs is by sharing good health habits and answering common or topical questions patients are asking on your Facebook page. This will require more effort on your part, as you’ll need to involve your doctors and subject matter experts, but you’ll be better serving your community.

BE RESPONSIVE

People don’t like making calls. Instead, they’ll send a message to your hospital via Facebook and be disappointed when you don’t respond in a reasonable amount of time. In fact, your average response time is posted on your Facebook page (e.g. “Typically replies within a day” is bad).

If you can’t have someone monitor the page for messages regularly (e.g. by using alerts or the Pages Manager app), then you should set up an instant reply, located under Settings > Messaging.

Your auto responder should direct people to oft-sought resources such as directions/parking, billing, pre-registration, etc. Note, you only are allocated 250 characters, so consider using bit.ly to shorten your URLs.

PROMOTE YOUR STRENGTHS

Reputation does matter, which is why it’s important for hospitals and healthcare systems to raise community awareness of their commitment to advancing patient-centered care. This is the major reason why you apply for healthcare industry awards, such as Leapfrog’s Top Hospital or Best in KLAS.

In addition to promoting the expertise of your staff, as explained in the previous section, you should bring attention to your merits. Since most of your social media followers are likely past/current patients, community members and stakeholders, these types of posts will reinforce the value of their relationship with your hospital and can lead to referrals and repeat “business.” 

Your staff can further amplify the message. Have your marketing department send an email internally with guidelines on how staff members should publish/republish award-related content on their own Facebook accounts.