Hi there and welcome to the webinar on maximizing social media to reach your patients. My name is Shannon Quinn. I'm an executive vice president at LC Williams and Associates. We're a Chicago-based PR and marketing firm that has been around for about 35 years. My role there is as the head of marketing for a variety of healthcare and consumer clients, and I lead all of our digital marketing activities. So I have a lot of experience in doing social media for healthcare organizations, both at the association level and at the practice level. I have been working with the AASM for nearly a decade, so I'm very well equipped to talk about different sleep topics and understand the various sleep issues that you are dealing with on a day-to-day basis. Today's objectives are first to define the ways for AASM members, that's you, to reach your patients using social media. We want to help you enhance your individual expert positioning in your community as well, and lastly, drive awareness of sleep topics among patients and other healthcare providers. So first off, we really want to help you reach those patients with all the messages we're getting out. We want you to be seen as the expert in your community, and we want people to start talking about sleep topics and really spreading the word about sleep apnea and other sleep disorders so that we're driving patients into your practice. So today's presentation will focus on a few different things here. Who do you want to reach? Why are we going to use social media to reach them? What should you share? Where should you be? And how do you get started? Let's start with the first question. Who do you want to reach? Prospective patients, current patients, and prospective employees are all on social media. We know that they're looking at your pages to gauge about your culture and offerings, and it's a great place to educate them about general sleep topics. Social media is also a really good place to reach potential partners, so other organizations in your community that you could work with on a larger basis, as well as community leaders, whether that's the media, legislators, other influential people in your town. If you're on social media and you're in the right places, we guarantee your reputation will be impacted and your brand awareness will go up. So why use social media? First of all, it is, at this time, the primary information source for patients and influencers. Everyone's on social media. So many people rely on it for their day-to-day news, for their information about local companies, and for their referrals from their friends and family. Users spend 70% of their media time on smartphones. We've all been in this scene before where people are constantly on their phones. It takes away a lot of the when and the where. We know that people are out there looking for information day and night, and we can put out information out there as a resource to reach them. The average social media user maintains five accounts. So while there are some social media channels that maybe are more important than others, particularly if we're reaching different age groups, most social media users are on multiple places. So it's important that we have a presence in a lot of different channels and that those channels really complement one another. That you're using the same types of messages, the same tone of messaging, and the same branding across all the channels. So if a user, potential patient, current patient encounters you on Facebook, they're going to understand that you're the same company, the same brand, the same person on Twitter. So having a strategy that makes it so you have a strategic brand voice that looks the same and feels the same across channels is going to be very important. Overall, social media is extremely important in helping to deliver your messages to patients across channels and across different types of patient audiences. So what can social media do more specifically? Thinking about the different types of things we can and should be posting, what makes a good social post? The most important thing we're seeing out there from different sleep centers and sleep experts is using the venues to inform and educate their patients and potential patients. This takes so many different forms, from tips on how to get a great night's sleep, to research studies informing people about new discoveries, to giving people information about specific sleep disorders that they need to be aware of. I picked a few different examples to show you here because I think a couple of these do a good job of not just giving advice, but tying into a seasonal topic or a trending topic that patients are very interested in inherently. The first one, what can you do to get your child to bed at the right time, is really good topic for back to school. People are thinking about this right this minute. School is going back in the next week or two in some markets, they're already back. How do you get your child to bed back? How do you get your kids back on the right sleep schedule is the exact kind of content a patient is looking for right now. That's a good post to put in this August timeframe. On the other side of the coin, why working from home is so disruptive to your sleep schedule is a great trending topic. People have been working from home for about a year in many communities and may not be going back to work due to some of the issues with pandemic. Understanding not just how working from home impacts their day-to-day life, but how it might be disruptive to their sleep is something that will be interesting to them today. Keeping information very timely is a key to keeping social media engaging and interesting for our customers. Another thing that social media can do is personalize connections with you and your staff. We know from experience that many patients find the sleep center environment a little intimidating. The more that we can do to bring them a level of comfort with coming in for their exam or for their sleep test, we'll go a long way in building that relationship between you and the patient. Here are some good examples seeing staff in action, either just their faces in an image like this. We see them enjoying lunch together and having some fun together here in this post. We also see them just celebrating. Here's a new, you know, making sure that you see this new person at the front desk so that you'll see this smiling face when you walk in for your next exam. On the left here, we highlighted some puppies. Again, that is a way to just build a bridge. Everybody likes their dogs on National Puppy Day, and so if you've got staff with dogs, it's a great way to connect with customers and show them that, hey, we're all humans here. We're all approachable and we're part of your community. Come on in. There's nothing to be scared of. Social media can also help you build awareness of news or services. So whether it's letting people know you can help them with their troubled sleeping or something much more timely like the weather's causing an early closure, that's a great way to use social media and make sure people just know what your business is all about for both the long term and the short term. Very important today, it can help you recruit employees. The previous types of posts about staff and expert building can help show people what your culture is like and what you're about as a company, but it can also help reach out and draw attention for available positions. Here's a couple of examples from Twitter and Facebook that show job descriptions in action and give people a way to share and spread the word about any job openings you may have. And in this tight recruiting market, we know that any advantage in finding new candidates is important. Lastly, social media can help you drive word of mouth referrals. We think that one of the most important things to do is tap those positive patient stories, those patients who have had their lives changed by their treatment and have seen the day-to-day effects of, for example, using a CPAP machine, using their personal stories to give your practice third party engagement and help spread the word about the various great things that you can do. Here's a couple of examples. This one here is a video from a patient just talking about her experience with sleep apnea and how much better she feels since she began treatment. Another one here takes comments that come in via reviews and pulls them into a what our patients are saying kind of graphic. It's a great way to take all those good things you're hearing and use those as, again, great third party endorsements. So it's not just you talking about what good you can do. You're using those great words of your patients. That leads us to the question of where should you be? There are so, so many different social channels, some rise in importance, some shrinking in importance, but there are still a lot of options out there. And we know this isn't your full-time job. We'll really need to be selective about where you spend your time. We think the highest priority channels for engaging with patients, especially at the community local level are going to be Facebook and Instagram. Those are the ways that you can tap existing patients to share the word with other neighbors and community members. That's where people will find you just by location. And it offers, both offer some great sharing opportunities. We consider LinkedIn and Twitter to be more mid-priority channels. First off, let's talk about Twitter. It's a great venue to share information and build expertise, but pretty hard to create a regional or community footprint. On the LinkedIn side, that's going to be a great venue for you to reach other healthcare professionals, potential partners, and potential employees, but maybe not the best place to engage with patients. We'll dive into each one a little bit more here. But first let's talk about some other channels that may or may not be important for your business. YouTube is a huge channel. So many people watch YouTube. If you have video capabilities or videos about your sleep center, by all means, they should be placed on YouTube and you should have a YouTube channel. However, we think that that channel is secondary to the others that have more engagement and interaction. Pinterest and Snapchat are still pretty viable channels, but not really a great place to share our information and to build communities at a community level. And lastly, TikTok, while it continues to grow, especially with younger consumers, the topics are not quite as serious. It's a little bit more trendy and that content disappears very quickly. And most importantly, we just don't think you're going to get the bang for your buck for the time that you would spend creating TikToks that you will on the other channels. So Facebook, why focus on this channel? It is still the top social media channel with over 80% of small business users using it for marketing. The numbers on Facebook are just astronomical. 1.4 billion people are logging in every day and five people set up an account every second. 42% of marketers report that Facebook is actually critical to their overall plan. Facebook has really overtaken in ad spending as well as in the organic posting and information sharing as well as in events. So pretty much every aspect of your business can be marketed via Facebook. It's also the primary social channel for older individuals, which we understand is a main audience for various sleep disorders and sleep apnea. Other good things about Facebook are it is really easy to localize it to your community. As I mentioned, you can branch out from your patients to their friends and families and neighbors. So we think it's one of the best channels to really establish yourself as a local expert with local advice and expertise. It is largely used for persuasion and education. So there's a really great venue right here for all of the tips that you want to share or new findings about sleep. This is one of the things that people go to Facebook to find great tips and advice, and they're likely to share it if they find it useful. It's more likely to be a personal than a professional network. When we're trying to reach patients at an individual level about something as personal as sleep, that's important. And lastly, it's easy for followers to share all of your information and drive that word of mouth referral. The ultimate holy grail is that a patient follows you on Facebook and when you post interesting information, they share that to their followers. It's a way of saying not only, hey, read this great interesting article, but this is a business that I trust. This is a business that I rely on, and you should too. While we'll focus today on organic content, there are also a lot of opportunities to promote posts or put advertisements on Facebook to reach new audiences at a pretty cost-effective level. It's pretty easy to enter Facebook with as little as a $50 budget, setting zip codes and age ranges of patients you want to reach and seeing how many clicks are driven to your ad or to your page. Again, there are very few advertising venues out there that are going to be as cost-effective as Facebook at reaching a very micro-targeted customer. Next, let's talk about Instagram. Instagram is tied to Facebook, so some of your posts can be united. That's one of the great things. And as you build a community on one, that can reflect over onto another. But it's also just a very important and popular social network in its own right. In many cases, overcoming Facebook among some of the different age groups, particularly millennial women. It's very image focused, so it's real-life images or information, but in snippets. So, we have to have the capability to create those images if we're going to focus on Instagram. It is a little more difficult on Instagram to share information and links. We need to keep links in the bio, so it's less about sharing links to outward sources or stories, and more about sharing, like I said, those small snippets of tips or a few bullet points of information. But if you have interest in creating graphics, it can be very, very useful in establishing influence and reinforcing your brand for patients. Twitter is a very popular site. The reasons to focus on it are users on Twitter are very active, they're very engaged, and they're very influential. So, you may not have quite as many users in your patient base that use Twitter, but those that are on it are active, engaged, and influential. And it's relatively easy to make an impact on Twitter. Tweets are pretty short, short form content, it's easy to share, it's easy to create. If you have one tip you wanna share, you just type it out and share it. You don't necessarily have to have a graphic like some of the other channels. And it's easier to build a follower base because they're looking at the topics that they're interested in, not so much at your geographic location. On the flip side, as we say at the bottom here, it's probably better for national or professional discussions than that one-on-one patient building interaction. It's a little less community oriented and the conversations you're gonna have on Twitter are going to span the nation, if not the globe. So it's harder to really drill down to the exact patient that you're trying to reach. I think this is a great place to be if you're trying to establish national expertise or just trying to see what the national topics of discussion are, but probably less important to actually make that one-on-one connection with a patient. LinkedIn is obviously another very popular social network. It expands the reach to the business network and beyond in a very professional way. It has a huge appetite for news and information. People who are on LinkedIn are really sharing those professional stories. So if there's a new research finding that you want to discuss with colleagues or if there are controversial tips out there, this is the place where you're gonna wanna have a conversation with others in the know. And you'll usually find a receptive and supportive audience. Everyone on LinkedIn is there to network with one another and build each other up. It's probably best for recruiting talent or for building networks within your hospital system or community with other colleagues in the area. This is not the best place to focus on patient one-on-one opportunities, but still a great place for you to be to recruit that talent. So now that we know where we're gonna focus, most likely Facebook and Instagram with a little bit on Twitter and Instagram, let's talk about what kind of posts and how we're going to build our presence on these channels. We basically have a five-step process here and they get a little bit more difficult as we go. We're gonna start by defining your business and brand, figuring out what it really is you wanna talk about. Next, build that community and figure out who you're gonna follow and who you're gonna work with. And figure out who you're gonna follow and who you're going to have follow you. Next, we're gonna just share information from other sources so that we can fill a pipeline with information without necessarily having to create a whole bunch of new content. But taking it a step further, we can talk about how to develop original content and lastly, how to engage people once we do that. So let's start about talking about defining your area of expertise. What does it look like to identify your brand? Well, the first thing to think about is who is your patient base and who are you trying to reach? And what's important to them? There are so many different sleep topics that you can discuss, but we really wanna focus in on that patient and potential patient audience and figure out the stories that are going to resonate most with that group. It can be very broad about the impact of sleep on your health and just encouraging sleep habits. Or if you have a more of a family patient base, pediatric sleep issues are very important as well. If you are speaking more to an older population, focusing on sleep apnea and other issues with sleep disorders that may need treatment are probably important. Most importantly, it's also key to decide what you wanna stand for in social media. There are a few areas where you might wanna take a stand. Is drowsy driving something you're really passionate about? Decide that and that can help you lay out the content that you want to get to your patients. If you really want to advocate for daylight saving time legislations or earlier school start times, social media can be a place to do that as well. You're reaching a lot of patients and community leaders. So make sure you have an idea of what kind of statement you wanna make on your social, what it is that you wanna stand for, and make sure to weave those things into your content. Step two is going to be building your community. So while most of our focus on Facebook and Instagram is going to be getting people to follow you, and we do that by asking them at every step we possibly can, making the links very easy on your website, on invoices, on patient communications, or having kiosks with QR codes right in the lobby. The other important factor is who are we going to follow and who are we going to take information from to share? The AASM would love it if you follow their channel on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We also recommend following various policymakers and government organizations. It's a great way to find trending information or new research that you wanna share so that you can be the first to share that with your patient population. Health-oriented media and reporters are also great to follow. Again, you wanna be seen as the local expert, so you need to be in the know. Make sure you're following anybody who shares information about sleep topics, especially those of the big media who might share it first. Following local and national sleep experts, physicians, and researchers, and your colleagues is also a great way to see what's trending and make sure that you can weigh in on important conversations. Following those local influencers, legislators, and media is going to help you understand what's trending and important to your community at the moment and make sure that your content can be responsive to the topics that are happening in your local town. Take the time to curate that community. It's not something that happens overnight, especially on Twitter or Instagram where you're finding people to follow. What you really wanna do is search out the topics that you're interested in and find the people talking about it. Follow them. Pay attention to event posts or hashtags that might be relevant to the sleep topics you're interested in. Read the conversation, so don't just look at the original post, but see everybody who's commenting and see if they're worth a follow as well. Click on hashtags that are interesting to you. And of course, follow some people for fun. While you're creating this network as a professional endeavor, it's also important that you wanna be there and that you're seeing things that interest you. If you're really into sports, make sure to follow a few of your local team experts. Or if you're into comic books or television, follow reporters that cover those beats. That way, the information about sleep and all of the professional things will be interspersed with some more interesting, personal things that are just for you. Lastly, no matter what you do, just feel free to unfollow anyone on any platform the minute they become annoying or just aren't speaking about what you care about. I have found that if I'm following people and start to dislike their content, I log in less and then I'm less engaged socially. It's important to keep curating your community so you're seeing stuff from people that you'd like to see that is enriching you and giving you information you want to have. And it goes beyond that, or if they're talking about topics that interest you or outright annoy you, go ahead and hit that unfollow button and never look back. Step three, now that we are seeing a ton of different content from a lot of different places, we're gonna start to share things. And that's ideally going to ladder up to the topics that we decided on when we decided what the brand is gonna stand for. One of the easiest things to do would be to share information from the AASM channels. The social media team at the AASM does a great job of sharing relevant studies and information tips for patients as well as healthcare providers. And when you find that information interesting for you and think your patients would be interested in it, please go ahead and give it a share. You can also see what others are talking about on these topics. So if the topic pops up and you're interested in seeing a very variety of ideas, go ahead and share others' views as well. I would be careful to make sure that anything you share is from a vetted expert. So if you have someone who's going to be doing this for you on your team, either a social media or a marketing person, make sure that you discuss what the qualifications will be for vetted sources that you're sharing from. Those that follow you will anticipate that it's coming from you. And so it's important that you feel confident in the takes that you're sharing. Lastly, a more advanced tactic on sharing information would be to actively go out and search for topics on information you want to share. If you're not seeing a ton of Daylight Savings Time content come across your feed from people you follow, but it's getting closer to springing forward or falling back, go ahead and search Daylight Saving Time in the search bar and see all the posts and takes and articles on the topic. I guarantee you'll find more things that are relevant to share with your audience that will be easier than creating a whole new post on your own. The key is keeping your feed pretty populated with information. So people come to rely upon it for interesting tidbits about sleep. Step four, now we're ready to develop your own original content. We're going to go beyond sharing others by creating our own. So we can provide general healthy sleep recommendations or tips. That's stuff you can do very easily. You talk about it every day and you know those tips like the back of your hand. Find ways to utilize it for social media content and keep it seasonal and current. And you'll find that people are very interested to see it and share it. You can also share news articles, but now let's add your own input or make a statement about that so that your patients see your own personal perspective along with the article that you're sharing. We also recommend that you take photos or create images with your own branding. And we'll give you some advice on how to do that. But our biggest tips for original content are again, stay current with seasonal topics and news, whether it's the Super Bowl or Daylight Savings Time or just news that's coming out. Make sure that things that you're posting are tied back to what people are interested in at that exact moment. Social media is very current and the more current you stay, the more relevant your content will be. We do want you to use images and videos to drive attention. And we also recommend that you always tag organizations or use hashtags to drive more views of your content and also give proper attribution for where you're sharing information from. So about those graphics, I would like to give a recommendation for the site that our firm uses for basic social design. It's called canva.com. There are a handful out there and if you search Canva, you can find some competitors, but this is the one we use. We find that it's very easy because there are tons of templates, images, and prebuilt graphics that you can use to simply customize and give yourself a really nice professional designed look. As you can see here, you can just pick the exact thing you're trying to create, whether it's an Instagram post or LinkedIn post or a story and start with the exact right size, grab the template for what you're trying to use, change the colors to your own color scheme and a photo that makes sense for you. And voila, you have a really nice looking image to post. Doesn't have to be that hard to create images these days. You do not need a designer on staff as long as you're tapping some of the right resources. So we have the content. Step five is taking things a little further and trying to find ways to engage with the followers that you have as well as participate in conversations of those you're following. So we're gonna ask questions in content, asking things like, what are the barriers to your bedtime routine? Or what do you do to relax you? Are good ways to get your patients and people talking with comments on the feed. The more that happens, the more likely your feed is to show, your news is likely to show up in their feed and that's what we want to happen. Also, the more they interact with you, the more your brand becomes relevant for them. We also recommend that you reply with your opinions to others' posts. So if you are following other sleep experts, either a little comment that says, hey, this was really interesting research, thanks for sharing. Or, wow, we find the same thing in our own practice, goes a long way to just give you more visibility. Anyone who follows that account will now start seeing your comment and consider following you. It's also great to just start and maintain ongoing conversations with other users, especially in areas like Twitter and LinkedIn, where you're there to network and maybe build a more national network. So some of the pros of engaging is it does help establish those relationships and put your expertise front and center. The con is, let's be honest, it's going to take more time. The more you engage, the more your engagement is expected. If you go out there and you're chiming in on a topic or starting a conversation with someone, you can't just not log in for a week. You're going to have to remain a little active. So make sure that when you start doing this, that you're ready to commit to being active on the platform. However, you can always feel free to disagree with someone on any topic. Here, we have an image that says everybody is saying no, but you want to say yes. That's fine to go ahead and disagree. Some of the ways we recommend you do that are first, explain your dissenting view. So either retweet the post that you disagree with or comment directly on it. Be respectful of others' opinions while stating your own position and never denigrate or insult anyone. But go ahead and say, hey, I have seen this take on other posts and we don't find the same thing in our practice. Here's why. Don't feel that you need to maintain that kind of conversation or argue back and forth with anyone. Definitely never engage with trolls or those who insult you. And always remember you don't have to weigh in on a topic, but if you think a topic is important and you want to get your view out, and as I said, you want to engage, go ahead and engage, even if you don't agree with the majority opinion. That's what social media is all about, expressing different views and seeing other people's views. Maybe once in a while, we'll actually persuade someone. I'm not sure that happens very often, but it's always worth a try. So that concludes our presentation on how to use social media. I hope that it's been enlightening as we talked about who to contact and who to reach on social, why we're using social to talk to them, the different types of posts we want to get out there and what we should share, as well as how to reach them on the various channels. We have a lot of different social media resources at the AASM, including this particular link here, which will take you to a guide on getting started on social media, a guide to social media best practices and a document called Twitter 101, an introduction for the AASM member. If you're interested in reading more about how to get started on social, I highly recommend using these resources. There's also these great tips for success on social media that you'll find at the AASM site. These have great pieces of advice for how to represent yourself and your business and set yourself apart while using social. Thank you very much for your time. We hope that these tips have been helpful and that you can use social media to maximize your relationships with your patients in the future.

webinar

social media

healthcare organizations

patients

expert positioning

content creation

engagement