Today is Social Media Day. It is the celebratory day of “technological advancements that enable everyone to connect with real-time information, communicate from miles apart and have their voices be heard,” according to a post on Mashable’s Website.

Happy Social Media Day! Hospitals need to embrace social media too!

Social Media Day, created in 2010 by Mashable—the popular news source for all things digital, social and technological—is a global event where folks can meet up in their community to connect and socialize.

There are numerous events and meetups going on all day today!

Are you attending any social media meetups in your community? We want to know!

Hospitals and Social Media

While on the topic of social media (on such a festive day), did you know that hospitals can and should engage in this (social) media revolution?

Social media provides a lot of opportunities for hospitals, such as:

• Lower costs

• Higher visibility

• Greater communications

• Internal brand awareness

• Patient/visitor perceptions through monitoring

If you don’t have social media for you hospital, maybe it’s time to rethink that and integrate a strategy into your marketing plan. After garnering mad popularity (and not only with the kids–with businesses too) and having its “own” day, I would say that social media is here to stay, and that it’s definitely worth having for your hospital.

AVID Design can help you develop an effective hospital social media strategy that maximizes your hospital Website’s goals and integrates seamlessly into your marketing plan. Contact us today to find out more.

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I’m sitting at the Healthcare Marketing Strategies Summit in Orlando over the past few days and watching the tweets that have been posted about it through the various attendees. If you don’t know, you can follow the discussion through the use of hashtags. This event has a hashtag of #HMSS2011.Most folks probably use a twitter client such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. Have you heard of Twubs though?

Twubs.com = Hashtags made useful. From their Web site:

1. Twubs are Twitter groups built around content aggregated from #hashtags.
2. You can view the full social landscape of a Twub with tools such as our Live Tweet Feed which pulls in external images, videos and links, and our Tweetups & Events Scheduler.
3. You can Start searching for your favorite topics now and take full advantage of these and many more useful Twub features to connect and share with people of similar interests.
4. You’ll see quickly who are the top contributors so that you know who to listen to and who you may want to invite to a tweet up

So you may want to figure out a strategy for using Hashtags in your organization events and create an official Twubs page/group. This would be a great way to aggregate content during and after an event. You could use it at press conferences, Classes/Events, Foundation events, patient educational events… the list could go on and on.

Andy Darnell | Director of Web Development | AVID Design

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Earlier this week, Adweek reported on a Webtrends report that suggested “the performance of the average Facebook ad is abysmal.”

Although it made for a hot headline, it was perhaps not the most accurate—or fair—statement. And in the context of using Facebook ads to promote hospitals online, it might be completely misleading.

The metric used to gauge “abysmal” Facebook ad performance was CTR, an acronym for “click through rate,” which is a popular metric for analyzing PPC (pay per click) advertising. Most simply, CTR is a the percentage of clicks an ad gets in comparison to how many times it appears (these appearances are known as “impressions”). So, if an ad appears 100 times in day and 10 people click on the ad, the ad has a CTR of 10.0 percent.

The report said the average CTR for all industries 2010 was 0.051 percent, which declined from 2009’s 0.063.The worst performing CTRs were for healthcare ads, which reported 0.011 percent.

Regardless of year or industry, those are some very poor numbers. Abysmal, even.

But are they enough to say Facebook ad performance was abysmal in big bold headline letters? Not quite. Here are two reasons—with a particular emphasis on considering Facebook ads for hospital marketing and advertising.

Low CPMs: Brand Exposure for Pennies

Facebook offers two pricing models for its ads. The first is the more traditional PPC model of CPC, or “cost per click.” It’s exactly as it sounds: Every time somebody clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged anywhere from a few cents to several dollars.

The other model is CPM, which stands for “cost per thousand” impressions (the “M” presumably is a nod towards the Roman numeral for “1,000”). Rather than paying per-click (with a presumed end-result of a “conversion,” such as a sale being completed on a retailer’s Website), the advertiser is essentially paying for exposure, with lower expectation for clicks.

The report said that CPMs were “relatively low,” although the article failed to quantify that statement. Regardless, for hospitals, “low CPM” is a valuable hint that there’s an opportunity to get your hospital’s name in front of a lot of people, which is especially attractive for hospitals that don’t have (and perhaps don’t want or can’t afford) PPC campaigns with Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.

Quality, Not Quantity: Conversion Rates?

Let’s return to CTR for a moment…and let’s presume that Facebook ad CTR was high, such as with the earlier example of a 10.0 percent CTR.

Each one of those clicks cost money. Naturally, the more clicks, the more the ad costs (and that’s without introducing the concept of how ad rates fluctuate).

So, for a CPC ad, how do you determine its return on investment (ROI)? The short answer: conversions, or more specifically, cost-per-conversions, also known as CPV.

Lower CTRs generally result in lower CPVs since a high CTR is not a guarantee for success. For example, an ad with a headline that reads “Free iPads!” will presumably get LOTS of clicks. But when visitors reach the destination Website and don’t find free iPads, guess what? They leave—or put another way, they don’t convert. So yeah, you can have a 100 percent CTR and a 0.00 percent CPV, but still get stuck with the bill for all of those clicks!

Although there’s an impulse to suggest that “CPV talks and CTR walks,” CPV cannot be fully related to a PPC campaign because, as illustrated in the “free iPad” example, the quality of the destination Website is a significant factor.

Still, when considering the performance of an online ad service—especially if the focus is going to be put on CPC models rather than CPM models—it’s critical to appreciate how the means relate the ends, which AdWords fully fails to do in this article.

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Closing out this year, we decided to publish yet another “Top [insert number here" blog post.

Hey look...even Wayne and Garth had a Top Ten list! Schwing!!!

As tired as we were about hearing (and writing) about social media–no way, way–you guys sure seemed to like reading about it.

So, without further ado, here are our top 10 blog posts of 2010:

1. How to Setup an SMS Text Message Donation Service for Your Hospital
2. The Caduceus: Origins and Meanings
3. Five Ways to Measure the ROI of Healthcare Social Media
4. Top 5 Emerging Social Media…for Hospitals?
5. Hospital Website Standards and Best Practices… Does Your Hospital’s Website Live Up to the Standards?
6. Google Caffeine Impacts on Healthcare and Hospital SEO: Now What?
7. Friending Hospital and Healthcare Competitors? There’s No Question
8. Hospital Hurricane Preparedness and Digital Signage
9. iPad and Hospital Marketing: Let’s Start the Conversation
10. How Many Hospital Facebook Pages Should You Have?

Happy New Year,  we’ll see you in 2011–Party on!

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Well, another year has come and gone. So long 2010, hello 2011!

We’ve put together a compilation of this past year’s featured stories and hot topics from our newsletter, AVID Insight. If you are not an AVID Insight e-newsletter subscriber (which I strongly suggest you be), then here’s what you missed…

January 2010 – Hospital Website Patient Portals: Where to Begin

Offering advantages to both physicians and patients, patient portals are increasingly becoming a popular service for managing health.

• What are some features and functions of patient portals?

• What are the advantages of having a patient portal?

• How do you start a patient portal?

February 2010 – Six Essential Hospital Digital Signage Uses: the 2010 Edition

Digital signage is becoming more of a universal communication platform for healthcare facilities—both large and small, and becoming an integral part of hospital’s overall communication strategies.

• What is the value of digital signage?

• How is digital signage growing?

• How can digital signage be used at hospitals?

March 2010 – Traditional vs. Online Hospital Marketing: Erasing the Lines in the Sand

Times are a-changin’ in hospital marketing dividing “old school” traditional hospital marketers and “new school” online hospital marketers.

• What is causing this erosion?

• What new hospital marketing paradigms are emerging?

• What hospital marketing obstacles remain?

April 2010 – Six Best Practices for Hospital INTRANET Usability

The value of having an intranet is significant, and is continually becoming embraced by hospitals and healthcare systems.

• What are the challenges in identifying an intranet strategy for hospitals?

• How do intranets improve the workforce?

• What are some intranet best practices hospitals should consider?

May 2010 – Emotion vs. Intellect: Quality of Care Content and Hospital Website Marketing

There are two types of writing styles when writing hospital Website quality of care content. These two types—emotional and intellectual—can be challenging to write in order to satisfy these sensibilities.

• What are the challenges for writing quality of care content?

• How do you properly prepare and balance quality of care content?

• How do you deploy quality information on your hospital’s Website?

June 2010 – The Magic Metric: How to Improve Hospital Website Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are the most critical metric when analyzing Website performance and ROI for online healthcare marketing analytics.

• What is a Website conversion and how do they affect hospitals?

• What are some types of hospital Website conversions?

• How do you build a successful conversion strategy for you hospital’s Website?

July 2010 – All Hands on Deck: Five Ways to Educate Your Internal Workforce to Promote Your Hospital Website

Marketing your brand internally is essential in promoting your brand externally, so maintaining a well informed workforce to enhance external perceptions of your hospital’s brand is crucial.

• Why should your hospital’s workforce be informed about your brand?

• Why should your hospital’s workforce harness their influence with hospital patients and visitors?

• What are some concepts to consider as you improve your hospital’s marketing potential?

August 2010 – Is Your Hospital’s Website Ready for Caffeine?

With Google Caffeine being released this past year, the landscape for traditional SEO and indexing is surely going to change significantly.

• How will Caffeine index relevant content?

• How will Caffeine affect healthcare and hospital SEO?

• How will hospital and healthcare Website content managers prepare for the change of your hospital’s Website SEO?

September 2010 – Your Hospital Can Can’t Afford to Not Attend Healthcare Marketing Conferences

It’s no surprise that healthcare marketing budgets are tight, especially this past year. Don’t let economic conditions diminish the value of attending a healthcare marketing that is focused on what you do for the hospital.

• What is the value in attending a healthcare marketing conference?

• How do you get expenses approved to attend a conference by hospital marketing leadership?

• How do you really afford to attend a healthcare marketing conference?

October 2010 – Overcoming the Healthcare Marketer and Hospital Foundation Disconnect

Sometimes there is a bizarre disconnect between hospital marketing departments and their hospital foundations, which one would think would have a remarkably integrated relationship since they both share similar objectives for the hospital.

• Why is there sometimes a bizarre disconnect between the two?

• What are some advantages of integrating both departments?

• Read about how Tanner Health System and MCGHealth integrate their marketing and foundation departments.

November 2010 – Fanning the Flames: Reviewing Predictions for Hot Healthcare Marketing Topics in 2010

Last year we made predictions as to what we thought were going to be the hot healthcare marketing topics for 2010.

• What were some of 2010’s hot healthcare marketing topics?

• Were some of our predictions correct?

• Which healthcare marketing topics from 2010 will still be on fire in 2011?

December 2010 – AVID Design’s Annual Internet Healthcare Marketing Predictions: 2011 Edition

Since the year is coming to a close, we’ve come up with a few topics that are on the top of our list as far as what we believe is in store for online healthcare marketers and experts in 2011.

• What are our predictions for online healthcare marketing technologies in 2011?

• Is social media still hot? Is mobile technology still hot?

• Will increased spending for rich media continue?

Coming in January’s edition of AVID Insight: Hospital intranets and employee communication. Sign up today!

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