As healthcare marketers there’s never enough time to get everything accomplished and our to do lists seem to grow longer and longer as demands in our time increase.  And now enter social media and the pressure for our hospital or healthcare organization to have presence and be active on social networking sites.  Pamela Vaughn posted “7 Social Media Time-Sucks to Eliminate Today” on blog.hugspot.com.  If we heed her advice it will eliminate some time that is commonly wasted doing social media marketing.

In inbound marketing, we talk a lot about optimization — optimizing your content for search engines, optimizing your website for lead generation, optimizing your social media presence. But another very important thing inbound marketers must optimize is time. Yes, compared to outbound marketing, inbound marketing saves money and is much more effective. But you also need to put the time in.

However, marketers often spend too much time on strategies and tactics that don’t make any real impact, particularly in social media. Don’t waste your precious marketing time on things that aren’t worth your time. Avoid the following 7 social media time-sucks at all costs.

7 Social Media Time-Sucks to Avoid

1. Stop feeding the trolls. On the internet, trolls are people who make it their mission to disrupt online discussions (whether it’s on a forum, in a blog post’s comments section, in a social network, etc.) with the goal of provoking an emotional response. Often, their comments are off-topic, inflammatory, and disruptive to the conversation. In general, don’t waste your time on them; it’s often better to ignore their remarks than try to reason with them. Do your best to recognize trolls, take a deep breath, and move on. If you perceive someone as a troll, chances are your other readers will, too, so don’t worry about trolls negatively impacting your brand if you ignore them.

2. Stop maintaining multiple accounts on one social network. You have one Twitter account for customer service, another for marketing, and yet another for Sales. Your Facebook presence is also spread out across multiple Pages. There are some cases when more than one account makes sense, but be reasonable. Consolidating your presence into one account will save you the time of maintaining multiple accounts, help you attract more followers, and centralize your web presence. You can always have multiple contributors/administrators for one account if you want representatives from multiple departments to be involved.

3. Stop spending time on social networks your target customers don’t populate. It’s an unnecessary time-suck to maintain a presence on every single social network that crops up. Before you sign up for a social media account, conduct research to determine if your target customers even congregate there. Furthermore, adjust the amount of time you spend on each social network accordingly. It doesn’t matter if Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are the most popular social networks overall. If your target audience spends more time on a niche social media platform specific to your industry than they do on a ‘popular’ one like Facebook, spend more of your time there, too.

4. Stop tracking useless metrics. At the end of the day, it’s all about sales. While there are definitely metrics that can be good indicators of revenue and sales, there are some that just generally don’t matter. In social media, these metrics include your number of fans and followers. Rather than obsessing over these useless metrics, measure social media traffic, leads, and customers instead.

5. Stop talking about your product. Don’t waste your time talking about yourself and your products or services, because, well, no one really wants to hear it. What your fans and followers do want to hear, on the other hand, is your thought leadership. Rather than spending time talking about yourself, spend time creating and sharing educational, remarkable content that people will care about and want to spread to their networks. This will extend your reach and actually generate results.

6. Stop strategizing, and start doing. Too many businesses waste time preparing over-the-top, extensive social media strategy documents. They spend time creating them, and then they spend even more time waiting for their approval. By the time they actually start executing, they could’ve already been generating results. Sure, it’s important to have a clear vision for your social media strategy, but getting things done and being agile enough to adapt to new trends and developments is more important than having a definitive strategy document.

7. Stop responding to EVERYTHING. As your business and social media presence grow (and, isn’t that the goal?), you’ll undoubtedly start generating more fans, followers, and as a result, more discussion around your brand. If you kill yourself over trying to respond to every single comment or @reply, you’ll never get anything meaningful done. While it’s absolutely critical to be an active member of your community and engage with your prospects and customers, always prioritize and spend your time responding to the conversations that are truly worthwhile.

Start eliminating these social media time-sucks and focusing on tactics that really matter. You’ll love how much looser your schedule becomes.

Healthcare marketers are always looking for advice and ideas from experts.  Seeking new and better ways of doing things.  Or for confirmation of what we are already doing.  And sometimes we just need to be reminded of the basics.  We all need to step back and listen to others from time to time. Sharon Hudson, Vice President of MarketingProfs, recently published helpful advice from six leading social media experts.  Here are the their secrets to social media success.

1. Start with the Right Strategy

“Align with the goals of your department. That’s a good starting place. In most cases your department strategy should also align to a larger corporate strategy. We don’t want a communication strategy that is at odds with our service strategy.” (Shannon Paul, Blue Cross Blue Shield)

2. Know Your Objectives

“Tie your social media activities to existing objectives, such as increasing online sales, driving web traffic or boosting attendance at your next webinar or offline event. Set a reasonable target, see what happens and use it as a benchmark for future campaigns.” (David B. Thomas, Radian6)

3. Deliver Relevant Content

“Deliver the right content, at the right time, in the right channel to the right customer (or partner). Relevant content happens as a result of listening, thought leadership, Google insights, and community sentiment.” (Michael Brito, Edelman Digital)

4. Develop Meaningful Relationships

“Use social media as a platform for developing relationships. Show your thought leadership by answering questions on LinkedIn and Quora—it could lead to new contacts and leads.” (Shashi Bellamkonda, Network Solutions)

5. Integrate into Your Marketing Mix

“Don’t leave opportunities on the table; explore how you can extend your marketing effort by integrating social elements into your PR, events and customer support activities.” (Jane Price, Marketing Consultant)

6. Measure What Matters

“Distill social media measurement down to core metrics that your company is already measuring that have history behind them. When you show what social media is or isn’t delivering there is a conversation that can take place.” (Nichole Kelly, Full Frontal ROI

These are some very helpful suggestions that can be applied to hospital marketing.  The points are fundamentally sound.  The challenge is to implement them effectively in our own healthcare setting.  The more we adhere to these basics, the more successful our social media efforts will become.

Social media sites reach 82% of the online population and Facebook reaches over ½ of the world’s population.

Social media continues to show amazing growth.  In “It’s A Social World”, ComScore has issued a report concerning the growth and impact of social media.  Without a doubt social media has become the most popular online activity.  In 2007 social media represented only 6% of online activity but that has now increased to 20%. Over 1.2 billion people globally use social media sites.

The report verified that women spend more than 30% more time online than men.  Social networking is no longer a young person’s activity as the participation now spans all age groups.   And Facebook now reaches 55 billion people, which is more than half of the world’s population.   Despite the hype for mobile access and marketing, it still captures just a fraction of the fixed-line connection.

The study just proves again the impact of social media.  The extensiveness of social networking.  But it does not answer, for healthcare marketers, the question of how to take full advantage of this massive audience.  Savvy healthcare marketers have experimented with some success.  But there are so many unanswered questions. We continue to learn and hopefully grow smarter.  But with limited resources and some of the limitations of healthcare marketing, it’s still a learning process.   There is still much to be explored as we attempt new tactics and new ideas.  Stay tuned….there will be much to come.

As healthcare marketers begin to experiment and utilize social media, questions arise about how to measure its effectiveness.   Some would argue that a “likes” and  “followers” are an indication of brand endorsement.   Well politics may be teaching us that’s not necessarily true.

Micah Sifry reporting for CNN,  examines the impact of social media on the current GOP presidential campaign.  What he discovered is there really is no valid correlation between twitter buzz and Facebook followers to a candidate’s success at the polls.

There is a lot of monitoring of each of the candidate’s social media activity.  It is natural to assume a growth in the number of followers and a high occurrence of re-tweets are both indicative of support and success.  But actually, the actual votes at the polls show that social media activity appears to be more an indication of notoriety and celebrity.

Herman Cain had a great following on Facebook and created a tremendous amount of social network activity (although admittedly some of it was negative) but he is no longer in the race.  Newt Gingrich’s 1.4 million followers on Twitter would indicate strong grassroots popularity and support. But a closer view shows half of those accounts are outside the US and half the accounts are inactive.  His number of accounts is a function of longevity and notoriety.  Rick Santorun’s early success came from social activity but not the online kind.  His support came from social activity even more local and personal than online social networks.  It was the work of the evangelical church.  And his surprise showing overloaded his website and he was not ready to fully take advantage of his success.

Clay Johnson seems to be prophetic by stating in his book The Information Diet, there are empty information calories and to eat them is to do so at your own risk, for they can make you really dumb. In other words a link, or a follow, or a retweet is about as meaningful as a glance or a nod and certainly not an endorsement.

As healthcare marketers we are tempted to believe the notion that social media activity or likes or links are indications of brand endorsement and loyalty.  We often tout our social media success by citing such numbers. But if the current political campaigns teach us any thing, it’s that these conclusions are not necessarily true.

We shouldn’t ignore social media.  We should embrace it as a legitimate marketing tool.  But the numbers for number sake shouldn’t fool us. The effectiveness of social media is difficult to measure.  We are still learning how to interpret the data and how viable the data actually is.

“Likes”, “followers” and “re-tweets” may just simply indicate a fairly low level of interest.  The real challenge is converting those glances or nods into something useful.

You read about them almost everyday.  Somebody makes a mistake and posts something that’s inappropriate or is potentially damaging to the brand.  From the Red Cross, Chrysler and Southwest Airlines companies face uncomfortable situations.  Some handle it well and some don’t.  More damaging than the original blunder is when a company doesn’t address the issue or doesn’t handle it well.

Michelle Ponto with News10 in Sacramento  wrote a story quoting Josh Morgan of Edelman Digital  and Lori Bertelli of Augustine Ideas about steps to take to help minimize the damage if you are faced with a social media nightmare.  The steps are very applicable to healthcare marketers who face such critical issues.

1. Before you say anything on social media, take into account everyone who could be in your audience, not just the people you know for sure are in your audience. Remember, not everybody thinks exactly the same way you do.

2. Before you open up any type of social media forum, have a policy in place that lets people know that certain types of speech aren’t going to be tolerated and that the platform is being moderated.

3. If you find yourself getting emotionally involved in something online, take a step back. Don’t let commentators get you riled up as you could end up saying something that you regret.

4. Think about who is doing your social media postings. An intern may be comfortable using Facebook and Twitter, but are they the right person to be representing your brand online? It is easier to teach someone who knows your brand/business about social media than it is to teach someone who only knows social media about your company.

5. Set up multiple administrators on all social media accounts just in case you can’t get in touch with someone when you need to – or they leave the company.

6. Make it easy to do the right thing when you are setting up your policies.

7. Own a mistake and do it quickly. Don’t try to hide from it. It’s not going away.

8. Have a friend or an editor check things out. It might seem funny to you, but it may not be to everyone.

9. Understand that you can’t control social media. Instead, be ready to react and take ownership when something does happen.

10. Don’t be insulting or come off defensive. All it takes is one bad post to create a social media nightmare.

Very sound advice.  Advice that could be very helpful if your hospital or healthcare organization faces social media missteps.

Are moms important to healthcare marketers?  If so, then you better get social.  Moms use social media to communicate, stay in touch with family and friends, exchange information, be entertained and a host of other reasons.  eMarketer estimates that 23 million US moms are on Facebook…moms with children under the age of 18 use the site at least once a month.  That’s well over two-thirds of all online moms in the country compared to just over 50% of all online users.

Overall 26.5 million moms use some sort of social media.  That’s almost 20% of all social media users.

Females are the primary decision makers when it comes to healthcare decisions, and moms are usually the chief decision maker for their family’s healthcare needs.  That being true, healthcare marketers need to get social.  Moms are on social media sites interacting and gathering information.  And of course they are extremely interested in health information for themselves and their families.

So we need to be engaging those moms where they are.  On social media sites.  It certainly requires work.  And it requires more than just setting up sites to post ads or promotions for the hospital.  It requires engagement.  It’s not easy.  It requires quality content.  It requires responsiveness.  And it requires the efforts and cooperation of more than just the marketing department.

Moms are definitely social.   They are proving it everyday online.  And it provides great opportunities to connect and build brand loyalty.  Healthcare marketers should take notice.

QR Codes are becoming more and more popular but they aren’t appropriate for every use.

QR codes are everywhere.  And aren’t they cool?  They are great at providing additional information and for engaging consumers.  Brands like Starbucks and Lady Gaga are using QR codes very effectively to build loyalty and many retail brands are using QR codes to provide additional product information.

In fact, worldwide usage of QR codes is growing at more than 20% annually and barcode usage in North America is growing at a 42% clip.

But despite this rapid growth and the usefulness of QR codes there are some uses, which make no sense at all.  B.L. Ochman writing for Ad Age  gave some examples of some poor uses of QR codes.

1.   QR codes on billboards, too high ad too far away to get a clear scan.

2.   QR codes in subways and places where there is no cellphone reception.

3.   Barcodes in TV spots when by the time you can grab your phone and find the scanner the spot is over.

4.   QR codes with no instructions.  Not everyone knows how to use a QR code. 

5.   Using a proprietary code so you need a specific type of QR reader.  Most people will not bother to download a scanner just to read one particular scan.

There are many other bad uses of QR codes.  Some that don’t make sense at all.  You probably have seen some yourself.

So the point for hospital marketers is that QR codes can be very useful. But it is not something to use just because everyone’s doing it.  Not just because it’s a new fad. Its use should be strategic and it should be easy and useful.   Clear instructions and the benefits of accessing the scan are imperative.

QR codes is a technology that should be used and can be extremely useful in healthcare advertising.  Perhaps in more than any other industry, within the healthcare arena, QR codes can be the mechanism to deliver very valuable information that can’t be delivered in an ad or flyer or poster.

Do we use QR codes in hospital advertising?  Of course!  But make sure it makes sense and delivers a true benefit to the user.  Not just because it’s cool.

1. “In early March, Google removed from its Android Market more than 60 applications carrying malicious software. Some of the malware was designed to reveal the user’s private information to a third party, replicate itself on other devices, destroy user data or even impersonate the device owner.”

2. “Groupon is on track to bring in between $3 billion and $4 billion in revenue this year alone. Facebook’s 2010 sales were reported to be only around $2 billion in its sixth year of existence.”

3. “A study of 24,000 consumers across the 16 largest countries found that those who are most connected, living on the cutting edge of social media tend to be more ‘prosocial’ than average, being more likely to do volunteer work, offer their seats in crowded places, lend possessions to others and give directions.”

4. “99 percent of Android devices are vulnerable to password theft.”

5. “Recent estimates put less than 10% of the population using Twitter, far less than other social sites.”

6. “More than 3.34 million mentions were recorded over a one-month period of people making social asks.”

7. “David Poltrack, CBS Corp., announced that, based on a new research study, ‘age and sex don’t matter when it comes to increasing TV ad effectiveness.’”

8. “An average of 40 percent of the traffic to the top 25 news sites comes from outside referrals, the study found, with Google Search and, to a lesser extent, Google News the single biggest traffic driver.”

9. “Almost one-in-four South Africans use social media as a tool to look for work, but are concerned about the potential career fallout from personal content on social networking sites.”

10. “The percentage of US parents who allow their children between ages 10 and 12 to use Facebook or MySpace more than doubled from 8 percent a year ago to 17 percent now.”

11. “33% of Facebook posting is mobile.”

12. “Fully 69% of visitors to news.google.com ended up 3 places: nytimes.com (14.6%), cnn.com (14.4%) and abcnews.go.com (14.0%).”

13. “85% of media websites now use online video to cover news.”

14. “”Social media advertising spending will increase from $2.1 billion in 2010 to $8.3 billion by 2015.”

15. “Facebook is approaching 700 million users and Google handles over 11 billion queries per month. World-wide there are over 5 billion mobile subscribers (9 out of 10 in the U.S.) and every two days there is more information created than between the dawn of civilization and 2003.”

16. “Twitter reported that the network saw more than 4,000 tweets per second (TPS) at the beginning and end of Obama’s speech [re: death of Osama Bin Laden]“

17. “65% of all social media related to the royal wedding has come from the U.S. in the past month [April]. The U.K. has been responsible for just 20%.”

18. Re: the Royal Wedding: “911,000 wedding-related tweets were tracked in the past 30 days. That’s about 30,000 per day and accounts for 71% of all social media.”

19. “According to NPR’s internal usage data covering January 1 through mid-April, users who request audio — maybe a station stream, a national newscast, or NPR Music content — view twice as many pages as those who only read the apps’ content. On average, audio streamers rack up 4.2 pageviews per visit versus 2.4 for the text-only crowd.”

20. “Twitter penetration rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, according to new data from online tracking firm comScore Inc., which suggests that nearly one in five Canadian Internet users over the age of 15 regularly visit Twitter.”

21. “Traffic from social media has highest bounce rate. [...] If you’re looking for ‘hyper-engaged’ readers, those that click through five or more pages on your site, forget the guy who came from Twitter. A link from another content site is three times more likely to be engaged, and someone coming in from search, is also above average.”

22. “”Digital services accounted for an estimated $8.5 billion (28%) of the $30.4 billion in 2010 U.S. revenue generated by the 900-plus advertising and marketing-services agencies that Ad Age analyzed.”

23. “Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2010: $41,390. Total Facebook spent on lobbying, Q1 2011: $230,000″

24. “Nearly seven in 10 tablet owners reported spending at least 1 hour per day using the device, including 38% who spent over 2 hours on it. And while just 28% consider it their primary computer, 77% are spending less time on desktop or laptop PCs since they got a tablet.”

25. “According to a Network Solutions survey, the use of social media among SMBs has grown over the years, rising from 12 percent in 2009, to 24 percent in 2010 to 31 percent currently.”

In her social media and PR blog, “Commentz“, Sarah Evans and her staff compile a lot of interesting stats. She cherry-picked the most relevant for marketers and recently shared them with Ad Age. They can be quite useful to healthcare marketers.

1. “Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US.”

2. “Seventy-seven percent report that they use social media to share their love of a show; 65% use it as a platform to help save their favorite shows; and 35% use it to try to introduce new shows to their friends.”

3. “Facebook users are overall more trusting than non-internet others. Pew reported, 43% of survey participants were more likely than other internet users to feel that most people can be trusted.”

4. “22% of all grandparents in the UK are using social networks, according to Mashable. The study, which collected results from 1,341 grandparents from the UK, showed that 71% of grandparents who use a social network use Facebook, 34% are on Twitter and 9% use the business social network LinkedIn.”

5. “In the first four months after its January 2010 launch in Russia, Facebook use grew by 376%, and today more than 4.5 million people use the site regularly.”

6. “The ‘Weinergate’ scandal caused a significant drop in tweeting politicians. According to VentureBeat, after the scandal ‘the number of tweets by Republican members of Congress dropped by 27 percent, while those of Democrats dropped by 29 percent.’”

7. Instagram “currently has a user base of 4.25 million in only seven months, with ten photos being posted a second.”

8. “It only takes 20 people to bring an online community to a significant level of activity and connectivity.”

9. “Nearly twice as many men (63%) as women (37%) use LinkedIn.”

10. “In the last election Google was the largest player — the Obama campaign directed 45% of its online campaign dollars to the search site.”

11. “59% of adult Facebook users had “liked” a brand as of April, up from 47% the previous September. Uptake among the oldest users appears to have been a major factor in this rise.”

12. “In 2010, 29.3 million readers read some 270 million pages of Post journalism each month, a record for The Washington Post. Of that, 28.1 million did so online and, while [Washington Post] brought in 4.2 million new readers on average each month compared to the previous year, [they] also lost some 35,000 print subscribers in 2010 alone.”

13. “25% of hotels [are] still ignoring social media.”

14. “Businesses are paying Twitter $120,000 to sponsor a promoted trending topic for a day. [...] That’s up from $25,000 to $30,000 when the feature was launched in April 2010.”

15. “AOL’s newsroom is now bigger than The New York Times’.”

16. “Mobile is one of the fastest-growing platforms in the world. With 40% of U.S. mobile subscribers regularly browsing the internet on their phone and a projected 12.5% of all e-commerce transactions going mobile by the end of the year, it’s a channel that you need to be aware of. According to Google, mobile web traffic will surpass PC traffic by 2013.”

17. “Twitter is 6-7 times smaller than Facebook.”

18. “There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.”

19. “130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks.”

20. “Users say they’re more likely to buy if a business answers their questions on Twitter.”

21. “Nearly half (42%) indicated that if they’ve already allocated a portion of their marketing spend to social media, they would increase this spend over the course of the year. Only 8% of those surveyed indicated that they would decrease social media spend.”

22. “13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device.”

23. “According to HubSpot, small businesses plan to spend 19 percent of budgets on social media vs. only 6 percent in larger businesses. A similar gap is shown for blogging with 10 percent of budgets for small business vs. just 3 percent for large.”

24. “33 percent of its worldwide traffic is inside the United States.”

25. “Facebook has three times as many accounts as Twitter, and 20 percent of Twitter’s users produce at least 80 percent of the site’s content.”

It’s worthwhile to look at these myths as they apply to healthcare marketing.  

• Myth 1: “Social Marketing is great because it’s free.”

Even if social media doesn’t cost very much, it does require a tremendous investment of time and energy.  And healthcare marketers have very little time to commit to new projects.  Especially ones that will be ongoing and continual.

• Myth 2: “Everyone’s doing it, so I need to.”

Even though so many have jumped on the social media bandwagon, many are not doing it well.   Doing it half-hearted or without a clear objective and strategy could do more harm than not participating at all.

• Myth 3: ” I can just post our press releases on social media.
”

Not really.  It requires much more. The social environment is not another platform for you to promote your hospital.  Rather it’s a place to take part in a conversation, in people’s everyday conversation and be there to provide useful information to your readers on their terms.

• Myth 4: “I need to be everywhere, dominating every type of social media.”

Not true.  Be present where your patients and potential patients are.  And do only what you can do well.  The best thing healthcare marketers can do is to invest your time and energy into one or two sites your audience use regularly.

• Myth 5: “Twitter is a tool for egomaniacs to tell people what they had for breakfast.”

This a myth coined accurately by journalist Eric Rice. However, as her research has found, tweeting gives your hospital a more “human” face.  They can see your brand personality.  Twitter helps turn your organization.  Appealing and engaging.

•  Myth 6: “Facebook is more for my kids, not for my business.
”

Facebook ‘ fastest growing audience is women 40+ It has become a very adult medium. It allows you to enhance that “human” feeling with photos, helpful healthy tips and ongoing discussions with your customers.

• Myth 7: “Social media won’t take much time.
”

An estimate of 1-2 hours per day may be required to actively participate in the conversations being conducted and created on social media. A busy healthcare marketing director will not likely be able to effectively maintain a social presence if it becomes just another task on the “to do” list.

• Myth 8: “The threat of receiving negative public posts and complaints is too high
.”

Consumers are already commenting in their offline and online social circles. It’s better to be part of the conversation so you can strategically defend your brand and respond in a timely way to problems. Being where the discussion is allows you to address existing problems and discover brewing issues before they get out of hand.

• Myth 9: “This thing’s useless – I tried it for a month and it didn’t work.”

Social marketing doesn’t give you instant, measurable results.  It will take time for people to find you, warm up to you, and start adding to your conversations.

• Myth 10: “Our customers don’t use social media sites.”

The audience is there and they’re going to have their conversations with or without you.  Take your primary target demo and look how many within your marketing area use social media.  It’s easy to research and you might be surprised.

For healthcare marketers, participating in social media is not easy.  It requires a commitment of time and energy.  And perhaps dispelling some of the myths will be helpful.