Building a Facebook Community Creates Marketing Opportunities for Atlanta’s Piedmont Healthcare
// By Ed Lamb //
Piedmont Healthcare, a full-service health system based in Atlanta, GA, currently directs about 10 percent of its annual marketing budget to social media outreach. While that commitment of advertising dollars to creating messages for Facebook, Twitter, and other digital networks already far outstrips the average of 2 percent across the healthcare industry, the share should steadily increase for years to come.
The shift from traditional advertising has benefited the hospital group in many ways, Matt Gove, Piedmont’s Chief Marketing Manager, tells us. “We put our money toward social because we already have a large online community and using digital channels is cost-effective. We get the targeted reach and the return on investment.”
He notes that the hospital group started pushing into social media in 2012 with a single dedicated staff member and assistance from BrightWhistle, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD). Piedmont now has more than 9,600 Facebook fans and thousands of followers on other networks. “We know who our audience is” and appreciate having several ways to communicate with them directly, Gove says.
BrightWhistle’s Chief Technology Officer, Michael Sengbusch, joined Gove to discuss the successes and insights from the social media push. The ongoing partnership also provided the basis for the pair’s recent presentation at the 18th Annual Healthcare Internet Conference (HCIC) in Scottsdale, AZ this past November. Gove and Sengbusch’s talk was titled “Knowing When to Shift Your Budget to Social Media Marketing.”
Why Facebook, or any social media at all?
“Your patients are all online,” explains Sengbusch, whose company specializes in putting together interactive marketing campaigns for healthcare organizations. “And Facebook makes the most sense for identifying them because, out of all the social networks, it is the only one that offers a viable paid marketing strategy.”
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