Consumers are linking in!  But they aren’t very active.

As social networking sites grow, healthcare marketers must keep a close watch on which ones could be a useful marketing tool.  Hospital marketers can’t actively participate on all social platforms so it’s important to know which ones are most effective.  Although a primarily a business social network, Linkedin has been growing at a very rapid pace.  Here are two statistics, which are important:

1.  A new member joins LinkedIn every 2 seconds.  LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing social sites and has become one of the more dominant ones.  Mainly a site for professionals who want to connect for business purposes, it usefulness to hospital marketers is probably limited.  Except perhaps for HR.

2.  LinkedIn users are less active than users of other social media sites.

Although LinkedIn is growing extremely fast, its percentage of active users trail other sites.  This makes sense since Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Google+ are used for socializing, LinkedIn is more for professional use.  So users of LinkedIn don’t visit or use it nearly as often as the other dominant social networking sites.  Credibility is higher on LinkedIn and it’s more useful for business purposes.

For healthcare marketers, LinkedIn is not your first choice for a social media strategy.  The other sites are more useful and efficient.  They are much more for participatory content and engagement.  With that said, as noted earlier, LinkedIn could be a very useful tool for HR as they seek and recruit professional talent.

 

Statistics accredited to Belle Beth Cooper writing for the Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.com).