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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The feel-good hit “Why Can’t We be Friends?” by the ‘70s funk band War makes it difficult to resist the cozy sentiment of universal friendship.

For doctors and patients, there are some reasons why we can’t all be friends, at least in regards to social media.

But in 2010—especially in the context of social media and healthcare marketing—the song’s power lacks the ability to provide a simple answer to a simple question. After all, the question of whether doctors and patients should be social media friends is one that is frequently discussed online—and one that is convoluted because there are many valid arguments that support both sides of the argument.

However, there is a simple answer:

• Doctors can be social media friends with patients.

• Patients can’t be social media friends with doctors.

Patients—and hospitals—should not expect their physicians to be active participants in online marketing and communications. That includes patients actively seeking out doctors on Facebook, Twitter, etc., or hospitals requiring physician participation in social media.

As with many other companies that want to embrace social media to foster a relationship with its customers, online/social media only works when there is an honest commitment to engagement. Mandating physicians to participate does not support this concept.

Furthermore, when patients cross the precarious line between the personal and professional relationship they have with their doctors when they seek an unwitting physician, it could very well result in him/her to cancel his/her accounts.

However, if a doctor should decide that he/she wants to embrace social media to be a resource or ambassador, that needs to remain his/her own decision. By granting doctors the power to make an independent decision, it:

• Improves the possibility of dynamic, positive social media experience.

• Creates a template for resistant physicians to enter.

But how would a patient know if his/her doctor was socially (media) available? Good question. That is when the hospital can promote the type of communication in their online and offline marketing communications—or the doctor can take the initiative to advise his/her patient that social media is an open channel of communication.

What do you think? Do you agree? What is your hospital’s policy or approach to this question?

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Sure we’ve all heard how great social media is for your hospital and how sometimes it’s difficult launching a social media strategy because of a little thing we like to call governance. But, if a proper governance policy is in place, social media can work wonders for hospitals. Here are some reasons why “the powers that be” at hospitals should encourage and embrace social media usage:

There are several reasons as to why hospitals should use social media.

• Higher visibility: Blogging, social networking and social bookmarking are highly—and some would say more—effective in reaching online users versus reaching them solely through your hospital’s Website.

• Greater communications: Social media tools are a powerful way to listen to your patients and obtain a better understanding of them, as well as an easier way to reach the media for news stories and press releases.

• Lower cost: Publicize and promote causes, hospital events, health fairs, support groups, etc. without having to spend tons of advertising dollars or inflate your marketing budget.

• Monitoring: How do people really perceive your hospital? Hear what they say, accept criticism (if that’s the case) and respond honestly.

• Internal brand awareness: Social media helps users engage and interact with several different communities internally and externally. Our  July newsletter actually discusses this more in detail.  Check it out!

AVID Design is an award-winning healthcare and hospital online marketing consultant with experience in developing effective hospital social media strategies and governance policies.

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