The Healthcare Entrepreneur Blog

In health care, social media requires strategy

by Tannus Quatre PT, MBA | June 4th, 2009 | 2 responses

Who has time in the day to update Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn?  If you’re a doctor, dentist, or physical therapist I bet you don’t…at least I hope you don’t.

It all takes time – too much time some would say.  I disagree with the back end of that statement, but fully acknowledge that getting your social media engine up and running takes a bit of work.

This article from econsultancy.com lists a number of tips for keeping your social media strategy manageable.  They name starting small, setting goals, and allocating resources as a few pointers, and I’d add that an integration strategy is critical in order to prevent duplicating updates/posts on multiple sites just to engage your audience.

It’s all interconnected after all, we just need to tie the pieces together.  A couple of my favorite integrators are HootSuite, Ping.fm, and Twitterfeed.

One of them is making social media sustainable. As exciting as it can be to start using Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media websites, excitement usually wears off real fast and many businesses struggle to sustain their social media efforts.

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Tannus Quatre PT, MBA is a private practice consultant and principal with Vantage Clinical Solutions, Inc., a nationwide healthcare consulting and management firm located in Bend, OR and Denver, CO.  Tannus specializes in the areas of healthcare marketing, strategy, and finance, and can be reached through the Vantage Clinical Solutions website.

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  • http://www.therextras.com Barbara Boucher, PT, PhD

    Excellent advice, Tannus. My decisons regarding online presence have been deliberate also. Sustaining my blog is my priority right now. However, I follow a few people’s twitters (tweets?) online without twittering myself. My small presence on LinkedIn is not yet more than a sideline online portal – similar to my presence on Wellsphere (how I found you). Finding work as a therapist, as you well know, is not too hard. So the networking-for-employment mission of LinkedIn hardly speaks to me.

  • http://www.vantageclinicalsolutions.com Tannus Quatre PT, MBA

    Thanks for your comments Barbara. I agree that social media with the purpose of finding employment as a clinician (PT, MD, DDS, etc.) is not the primary benefit. For the purpose of connecting with a market audience however, social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn play an important role. There are many ways in which engaging your audience through these channels can be quite simple, and require little, if any time on the part of the clinicial or private practice. In an effort to find efficient and cost-effective means to connect with an audience, it’s here that the real benefit lies.

    Tannus