Healthcare Marketers Look to Analytics, Live Video for Facebook Success

September 26, 2017

How healthcare brands are freshening up their Facebook strategy with testing, targeted audiences, and Facebook Live.

// By Melanie Graham //

Any marketer will tell you that Facebook is one of the most powerful tools your brand can harness. It continues to show its strength as the most popular social media app, growing its active user base to more than 2 million and posting one successful quarter after another.

But with more competition, new users, and algorithms frequently changing, healthcare marketers are having to freshen up their Facebook strategies to maintain success. What worked a year or two ago isn’t likely to work as well today.

Testing and Adjusting

Aaron Watkins, senior director of internet strategy and digital content marketing at Johns Hopkins

With the ever-changing social media landscape, it is important to keep track of what content is working and what isn’t. For Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, tracking performance and testing different types of content has been a crucial part of its evolving Facebook strategy.

“We developed an organic testing strategy to assess how different types of content resonate with our audience and what times of day those content types are most likely to perform,” says Aaron Watkins, senior director of internet strategy and digital content marketing at Johns Hopkins. “It’s an evolutionary process.”

For example, Watkins says content performs best during the morning and evening, and on weekends between 11 a.m. and 8:30 p.m. The Johns Hopkins team has also found four posts per day to be “highly effective” for its audience.

Watkins says his team has also experimented with longer versus shorter content on Facebook. While “short and pithy” can sometimes work, Johns Hopkins also has found a lot of success with longer posts.

At Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, detailed analytics and testing also has helped fine-tune the social marketing strategy. The introduction of SaaS software management has played a key role in this shift.

“We have evolved our content strategy to be informed by the analytics we see on day-to-day topics and posts we share with our audience,” says Amanda Rayno, senior social media strategist at Brigham and Women’s.