Social Media Lessons From America’s Biggest Hospitals

Hey everybody. It’s Jay Baer, founder of Convince & Convert, joined as always by my special Texas friend. He is the Executive Strategist of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It is Mr. Adam Brown. Adam, hello my friend.

Hello. Hello from 105 degree Austin as we record this today in the end of August.

Man, that is warm for this time of year. That is for sure. You know what else is warm? Is our brand new report on hospitals.

Hot off the press.

Hot off the press, as they say.

I want to segway there.

I liked that. Right. Our team at Convince & Convert, our research and strategy team, put together this brand new report all about how the biggest hospitals in America use social media. So Adam and I are going to talk through the report today and the findings. No guests, just Adam and I talking to you about the report. We looked through more than 10,000 specific social media posts using our friends at Rival IQ. Looked at 54 American hospitals, the top 54 by bed count, to learn all these lessons.

We’ll tell you some things that we didn’t expect. I didn’t know all this would be true. Adam, I’m sure you found some interesting things as well. And, even if you’re not in the hospital or healthcare business, social pros, listeners, you’re going to want to tune in for this because there’s some lessons here that you’re going to want to know regardless of what industry you’re in. Before we get right into it, it’s also an exciting day because as we’re recording this, Adam and his team have a big announcement as well. Tell the kids at home what you got.

Well Jay you know, it was a big weekend for us in Salesforce land for Social Studio. We do five updates every year. Everybody gets the same updates simultaneously and all of our customers receive, just yesterday August 25th, two really new features, among several dozen other minor features. One was Facebook posting, Facebook boosting, excuse me, so that you can boost your organic posts inside of Facebook right from within Social Studio, which I think is a pretty powerful addition. But the big addition this month was our Google MyBusiness Review Management.

So, we all recognize how important, in fact, Jay your organization came up with some really interesting statistics showing how important Google is for reviews, in some cases even beating out Yelp and and other providers. Now, inside of Social Studio, you have the ability to listen in on all the reviews. Whether you have one retail location or 8,000 retail locations, moderate and manage all of those reviews and responses to those reviews from inside of Social Studio. We’re pretty excited about it. This adds to one of 400 review sites that we’re now listening to in our a 1 billion sources of content.

A billion sources of content. Yeah, I mean, what a time saver, right? So if you’re using Salesforce and Social Studio and you need to boost a post, you don’t have to log into Facebook to do that. You want to manage your Google reviews, you don’t have to login to Google to do that. It’s becoming all in one, which was really smart. Just the best way to find it, ironically, it’s just Google Social Studio and you’ll find the direct landing page. That is the easiest way to do it. Check it out because it’s some pretty cool new features.

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All right, Mr. Adam Brown. Let’s talk about hospitals and social media. Here’s my premise and one of the reasons why we do this report at Convince & Convert. I don’t know that I can name another industry where social media is more innately tricky, right?

It’s just a, it’s a tough biz, right? If you’re a hospital and you’re trying to be good at social, you’ve got regulatory considerations, you’ve got a lot of patient privacy circumstances. A lot of people don’t innately love their hospital, unless they’ve been treated successfully recently. So you don’t have a huge natural constituency. In some cases you have a million different topics that you’ve got to cover across the whole spectrum of health and wellness. It’s just not an easy industry to be good at socially.

I completely agree. And there were a couple of interesting statistics that really jumped out to me. First, I do want to kind of double underline and highlight what you just said. It is a regulated industry. It is industry dealing with sensitive information in some cases. And I think all of us as social media practitioners can learn a lot from this because it is such a regulated industry. When you see the hospital and healthcare organizations able to do something, we can all learn there. But I also think maybe there’s an age and stage piece of this too Jay.

One of the interesting statistics that I saw in the report it said was 87% of 14 to 22 year olds had to Google to seek out ways to connect with healthcare professionals online. Now, I don’t know about your doctor or doctors. I can tell you my doctor is not in social media. But I get the feel that is changing. It’s changing because A: the consumers, the patients are expecting it. And we’re seeing a bit of a matriculation of doctors. We’re seeing younger doctors kind of come in who are more comfortable with social media, practitioners and administrators of hospitals much the same way.

Yeah, absolutely. I think the patient interaction nexus is changing rapidly. And we do a fair amount of consulting for hospitals at Convinced & Convert on social media and content marketing. And the things that we recommend, and the things that frankly they’re willing to do, or able to do are changing pretty rapidly. But what we found in the report was of these top 54 American hospitals, almost all of them are doing the, what we’ve considered to be sort of the social media blocking and tackling now. Right? So they’re on Twitter, they’re on Facebook, they’re on Instagram. Somewhat surprisingly, Twitter has the highest volume. So, hospitals are sending more tweets than any other type of social content yet perhaps, unsurprisingly it has the lowest average engagement rate. So, which makes you wonder if perhaps it’s time for a strategy change. If this works the works the least, but we do it the most is not typically something that would be on strategy. But, it is true across the board for hospitals. Lots and lots of tweets without a whole lot of engagement.

Well, I think it kind of reminds me of that old joke, the definition of insanity. You know, when you keep on trying to do something and expect a different outcome. No, you’re exactly right. I think that things were interesting to me where the idea that you just said that Twitter is the most popular used. Pinterest was also up there. But I thought an interesting statistic was one that we all are guilty of at some point, and that was 30 of the hospitals you survey, and you said you surveyed almost 60? Was it 54 or 64?

54.

54. 30 of the hospitals who had used Pinterest, only half of them had pinned anything in the first quarter of this year.

So, we got all excited and then the enthusiasm waned.

Brown: Yeah. And I think that’s very indicative of any platform where you’re not seeing engagement, where you’re not seeing that response. And as you said, you’ve got to change your strategy, you’ve got to change your tactics. And I think that’s one of the things that you discovered and some of the tactics and strategies that were indeed working for hospitals.

One of the things that we found this year, and we did a similar report last year as well in 2018, one of the things that has been pretty interesting in its change year to year is just how visual social media for hospitals has become. And, I think that’s true for almost everybody, right? We talked about that on this show all the time, Adam. The use of photography and videos, and we’ve even had professional photographers and videographers on this show to help our listeners get better at those kinds of things.

But we analyzed, as I mentioned, thousands and thousands and thousands of specific social media posts amongst the biggest hospitals in the U.S. And we found that of the 50 top posts published by any hospitals, 27 of them included pictures of people. So, not only are hospitals getting better at using imagery in their social media, but the imagery that tends to perform are images of actual human beings. Not equipment, not buildings, not waiting rooms, not “Here’s a dialysis machine” or whatever. It’s actual people. Now, that may not come as a surprise, but in a regulated environment I find that really interesting, right? Because you’ve got to get rights and permissions to actually use pictures, certainly of those who might actually be patients.

Absolutely. Another, I want to kind of add an overlay on at least when I read your report there too, you said without a doubt post with people have higher levels of engagement. And I think as we’ve talked about ad nauseum on the show, that’s pretty true of almost any social posts. What I thought was interesting though was the best of the best posts were posted, included people and graphics. And I started thinking about that a little bit. I was like, “Why would that be?” Well, one, you know hospitals graphics kind of showed them demonstrate thought, leadership and authority. It’s also a little bit right brain left brain. The right brain, the creative brain likes to see people, like to see people like them. The left brain likes the graphics, or the analytics that are talking about how can we be healthier, how can this hospital assist me not just on those days where I have to take my child to the emergency room because he broke his arm. But you know, doing all of the other types of care and, and wellness that a good hospital is known for.

Absolutely. I found that really fascinating too. And, there is a lot of data, there’s a lot of thought leadership available and that sort of mini infographic, if you will. It does perform. And, thinking about it just from a production standpoint, one of the little micro stats that we uncovered in this research was that on Instagram carousels, right? So a multi-image array, typically known as a carousel, is getting double the engagement of single photos.

Wow.

Double the engagement 2X. Which is pretty significant. So that same idea, Adam, of like, “Okay, well maybe what we do is we have a picture and then we have some sort of a graphic or an infographic or a stat or something else that sort of pays off that photo and kind of explains why it’s important or what the context is. Maybe that’s the formula”.

And you have to think about it. That health and wellness information is one of the most popular things searched in social media. We are inundated with ways of making our health and wellness better. I mean, all of us, not all of us, probably many of the people who are listening to this show have an Apple watch or an Android watch that’s showing you your blood pressure, or your pulse. That’s encouraging you to go out and exercise and run and game-ifying that entire thing. Hospitals are aware of this, so they’ve got to find content that can kind of associate and be meaningful for that. So yeah, exactly. But you’re right, the carousel statistic that’s off the charts.

It really is. I should tell you listeners to download the report yourself for free. Again, lessons clearly if you’re a hospital, but for other brands as well. You can get it right now. It’s Bitly/Socialhealth20. B-i-t dot L-Y slash social health 20, all lower case. You can grab that right now. Bitly slash social health 20, all lower case and grab the report at no cost. It’s got lots and lots of research in there.

We were talking a second ago, Adam, about the, the prevalence of of imagery in hospital social media and how imagery tends to outperform posts without images. But that’s also true for video. We found substantial-

And live video too.

Yeah, we suddenly saw a big uptake in video usage over the last year and this stat really surprised me. 39% of the hospitals we studied, again that’s 54 of the biggest hospitals in the U.S., 39% of them are actively using Facebook live.

Wow. You gotta. You got to wonder and perhaps you know, what type of content are they sharing in this? Is this, “Okay, we’re going to bring the camera into the OR.” Or, is this more kind of interview style where we’ve got an expert talking about type two diabetes?

Yeah, mostly. Yeah. Yeah. Mostly interview style, wellness facts and figures, those kinds of things. You know, it’s got to be stuff that isn’t going to be personally identifiable health information. And things that sort of get into, he said, she said or what have you. So it is fairly controlled, but the fact that they’re doing it live at all, I think is spectacular. So they’re taking a nutritionist and putting that nutritionist on camera. It’s, I guess the best way to describe it, Adam, would be live podcast. Right? That’s essentially what it is. Like you and I do sometimes here on social pros. But I think it’s really commendable and demonstrates something that we know from our own work in this category, there is a remarkable appetite for innovation and experimentation in hospitals. You know, you might think of them as fairly staid and fairly conservative, but in terms of their social media presence, it’s absolutely not. So many of them are really progressive and frankly adventurous, right? They want to try, try new things and then many of them are.

It’s refreshing to me because we all know that health healthcare is one of the largest industries in the United States, and quite frankly the the world. We also know, as you said, hospitals and healthcare is one of the more conservative industries because of all the regulatory things that we’ve talked about. So if they’re able, 39% of the hospitals you surveyed are able to use Facebook live and get around HIPAA and all the restrictions that they have, that they’re comfortable putting people on live and taking questions from patients and and other people, man every industry, every social media pro listening to this show today should be really considering, “How can I use this new technology for my industry, for my brand?”

I couldn’t agree more. I mean if you took a survey of a hundred brands in general, 39% of them aren’t using Facebook live. Right? So it’s pretty remarkable. I’m glad Adam, at the top of the show, you talked about the new ability to boost posts from within the Salesforce Social Studio product because we found that boosting posts really works in the hospital channel. The average engagement rate for a post that has been boosted is 4.53%, this is on Facebook. Okay. 4.53% is pretty darn good.

I’ll take that data any day.

Yeah, for engagement rate 4.53% for boosted, 0.66 for unboosted. Right. So you’re talking about, that is according to my math, seven and a half X engagement rate boosted versus unboosted. And what we’ve seen, one of the big changes between when we ran this kind of report last year and this year, is a pretty significant uptake in the number of hospitals that are boosting posts. And while we can’t infer their exact budget, it seems to be that more people are putting more money into boosting Facebook posts. Which certainly is a lesson not just for hospitals but probably for many brands out there.

I think a rhetorical question for me, and you might have the answer or might not would be, where is this money coming from? So if we have these health care professionals, these hospital administrators that are using it, and without a doubt 4.53% engagement the ROI is there. That is nothing short of spectacular. But I’m curious where that money is coming from. I’m going to assume that hospitals, like everybody in the healthcare space is increasing their overall marketing budgets. And with that perhaps social is getting more dollars, but I wonder if they’re doing something less so they can spend their money on boosting because they are getting the level of act of of success that they are.

Your mileage may vary and I’m sure this differs from hospital system to hospital system where we see that budget coming from at Convince & Convert most typically is either outdoor and out of home. Which hospitals typically invest in quite a bit depending on your market. So a lot of out of home and then digital display, right? Like taking money out of banners essentially and putting it into boosted posts. And in some cases trimming your paid search to have a tighter nexus of search terms, and not being quite so broad. Because obviously on a per click basis, some of those broader terms like plastic surgery or maternity, et cetera, it can be really, really expensive on a cost per click basis.

And so, what we’ve seen is some hospital systems say, “Hey, let’s not go after the really general ones. Let’s pull that in a little bit, take some of those savings and advertise more in social media where we know we’re dealing with an audience that is A: perhaps already friendly to the cause. And B: we can do some additional things from a targeting perspective that we can’t always do in paid search and certainly not an out of home.

Did you get any insights as to how these hospitals are targeting their boosted messages. I’m assuming that they’re going to be doing it from a geo standpoint, unless they’re a national hospital like Mayo clinic. Which I know is well represented in your study. But are they doing any other kind of demographic, psychographic types of targeting?

Yes. So what we have seen, and again everybody’s program’s going to be a little different, but certainly geography, as you mentioned, a lot of remarketing, right? So people who have been to the site before. If you’ve been to a hospital website, there’s probably a reason for that. You know, you’re not like, “Hey, I’m just kind of doing a browser surfing session and I’m going to go to ESPN, and then maybe I’m going to go to Netflix, and then I’m going to go to my local hospital”. Like that’s not a use case that typically happens without some sort of need or research. And so, a website visit typically indicates some sort of funnel stage. And then you’re going to look at, depending on the hospital in their specialty, you see budget applied to life-stage, right?

So, parents of a certain age, right? Who may be thinking about, “Where do we want to have our next child?” Right? “Do we want to go back to the same hospital or change hospitals?” Those kinds of things. And then on the opposite end, older residents of the geography who may be thinking about later stage care for themselves or for their parents.

Hmm, interesting. We’re all in this together. We’re all using the same strategies and all in the same tactics. It’s a trend to see how industry like hospitals can use this. Jay, there was another interesting statistic that I found that I think segues very nice into our discussions around video. And that was YouTube was the most shared domain in terms of posts and other social content.

Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was really fascinating that you’re seeing tons of of YouTube sharing. I think it speaks a couple of things. One, hospitals have really embraced video storytelling as a content format. But two, they continue to think of YouTube as sort of the home base for that video and are posting links to YouTube on Twitter, or links to YouTube on Instagram, or links to YouTube on Facebook. Instead of taking that video, cutting it down differently, editing it differently, and then putting it natively on those channels. Which I suspect will be what we’ll see in the following years report is more use of a video natively in each channel instead of posting links to YouTube.

Which is certainly what we do here at Social Pros, right? So if you followed the show and you follow me in social media, or add Convince & Convert, you’ll see that when we do video teasers for each episode, like we will for this episode, right? There’s a video teaser for Twitter. There’s a video teaser for Instagram. There’s a video teaser for Facebook. And then there’s a highlight video on YouTube. But it’s four different video files, right? We’re not posting the YouTube link and we’re using the same video. We have four different videos for each episode. Actually, I think we have six different videos for each episode technically. So, that is most definitely the best practice and something that I think all Social Pros listeners should ponder, that it’s not make it once and then drop the link everywhere. It’s make it differently in each place because what works best differs in each place.

Who is creating all of this video content inside of organizations? I’ve had the opportunity over the course of my career to work with several hospitals, and hospital networks. And at least my experience where, these were probably medium size hospitals, but each and every one of them actually had a studio inside of the hospital with big cameras on wheels and light grids and things like that. So you recognize that this is an industry where they’re spending a lot of money on good video content. Is that the team that’s in this case kind of pivoting over? Or is the marketing or comms team, sales team doing it?

Everybody’s worked trusts can be a little different. But what we see is people who used to be a sort of a free standing, kind of enterprise A/V department, I guess maybe would be kind of how you would consider it, right? They’re like the in house studio as you mentioned. In some cases those folks have been now absorbed into a marketing role, or even onto the social media team. Because you think about all right, if you’re an in house hospital video guy back in the day you would video surgeries and they’d use those for teaching. Or, you know, that kind of program, right? So you might do, in any given month, you might shoot six things. But the average length that each of those things are is 10, 20, 30, 60, 120 minutes. Now, in more of a social media world you might shoot 20 things, 25 things in a month. But the average length of each of those things is two minutes. Right? So it’s a different.

Snack able.

Yeah, it’s you know, when you moved to snack able you need more things that are shorter, and so you have more assignments and more paperwork and more deadlines. And so, what we’re seeing is those people who might’ve been sort of a freestanding kind of quasi department are now becoming part of the marketing infrastructure inside the system.

Jay, do you find it interesting, and this is something that you mentioned in the report, that all this transformation, exciting transformation is taking place in hospitals? Where up until a couple of years ago, there was, there’s a statistic that you had that said 59% of health care professionals had social media blocked on their computers in the hospital for a variety of legitimate reasons from a data security standpoint, and breaches and things like that. Is it interesting? And are you seeing that change as well, is the tail kind of wagging the dog here in terms of making the hospitals more progressive and more embracing of technology?

It’s incredible how fast it’s developed. Three years ago it was not very many organizations doing much right. More on the content side, less on the social side. And now they’ve taken their content expertise and kind of atomized it into social. There’s a few reasons for that. One, hospitals have to have some measure of awareness in the public in order to get those procedures and in circumstances where the patient actually decides where they want to go, or what physician they’re going to use and what hospital their physician is aligned with. So, there is a real market reality there. And if you’re trying to reach the public, increasingly social media is one of the best ways you can do that. So, there’s that factor. You have the socialmedia.org Health Consortium run by our good friend Andy [inaudible 00:24:18], who’s been on the podcast in the past. They have a collection of large hospitals who work together to solve social media challenges. I think that’s really helped a lot.

You have some all-stars in hospital social media, like Massachusetts General, like a Mayo, like Cleveland Clinic, like Ohio State University, the Wexner Medical Center who finished number two in our rankings this year. So you have some people that can inspire the rest of the industry to say, “Oh well let’s do what they are doing”. And that really helps give some of these other systems who may not be quite as naturally experimental, give them some air cover. Say, “Well geez, you know, Cleveland Clinic is doing it so we can do it as well”. And, and you know, I think it’s the way the industry works a little bit similar to higher ed, in that they don’t work in lockstep, but it helps when they’ve got somebody that they can point to and say, “Oh, they’re paving the way. Let’s kind of fall in behind them.” And allows them to make the business case inside the organization for budget and resources and really trying a new stuff.

As you and your team went and researched this and sat down with a lot of these hospitals, was it palpable? I know there are three of the top scored hospitals that you call out in this report. As you walk in to those facilities, is it palpable that they were doing things right? Did it feel like this was, not only a number one, number two, number three hospital as it relates to the use of social media, but they are just, they had swagger? They were doing things right. I’m just curious kind of the confidence level that they had.

Yeah. That’s a good question question. I don’t think so. I don’t think you can feel it in the air to interpret your question. Because there’s so much else that goes into being a successful hospital or health system then social media.

Thousands and thousands, if not tens of thousands of employees. Yeah.

Sure. But I will tell you this, you can almost instantly tell who’s got it together by looking at, you know, a very small sample of their social media. It isn’t a hard to to infer it. Now, we actually did a lot of research and a lot of data and a lot of algorithms and things like that to make it scientific of course, but you can tell pretty quickly. But I would also tell you that that if you look at the list of the rankings, go to Bitly slash social health 20 to download the report, bit.ly-socialhealth20, all lower case and download the report and you look at the top hospitals. Those top hospitals are not only top in social media, like they’re legitimately world-class, well known hospitals, right? This is not, you know, it’s not a surprise that these guys are at the top. Now, some of that could be a function of budget, right? That they are bigger and more well known, ergo they have more budget, ergo they’re better at social. I don’t think that’s the whole story, but it’s probably a little bit of the story. Sure.

And you did see some of the top brands change, in some cases quite dramatically from your number one, number two from previous years. Now no longer number one or number two.

Yeah. You know what I liked about that? I mean we didn’t see a massive, massive overhaul in the rankings. But yeah, meaningful rankings changes from one year to the next. What I like about that Adam, and I think the lesson that we can all take from that is, whatever you are in social media today and whatever you’re good at, or whatever you think you need to work on, and whatever your brand strengths are, your brand deficiencies, or your team’s strengths or your team deficiencies, that’s true today. but it doesn’t have to be true even tomorrow. So, there is no reality forever. It’s just your reality right now. And, if hospitals who have some institutional challenges in social as we talked about in the outset of this program, if they can do it, if they can say, “Hey, we’re going to make it a point to get better at social in the next year.” And they can put their pin on the board and say, “Let’s go make it happen”. And they actually go make it happen than nobody listening to their show has an excuse.

Right. Yeah. Do not rest on your laurels. Takeaway is do not rest on your laurels. And anybody can move two to number one or number two with a modicum of budget and resources. Obviously you have to have those things. But you know, it’s the old joke of, the difference between the first and the second place horses at a race is sometimes hundreds or thousands of seconds. It doesn’t take much to move up. And that’s, if you’re a number one, you need to remember that. And if you’re number 40 you need to remember that as well.

Yeah. And sometimes you can improve your overall program just by getting involved in some things that you haven’t in the past. So, one of the pieces of the research that I found was really fascinating is how much hospitals have embraced dark social. A tremendous use of of Facebook messenger, in some cases, WhatsApp, DMS, all of this sort of things that are opaque to the public. Hospitals have largely got pretty good at that. And that surprised me a little. In fact, we actually took the time, this was no small effort. We actually sent personal messages through their Facebook page, private messages to every single hospital, to 54 hospitals. And made up some sort of malady. I don’t, I don’t remember what we said exactly. But I feel like I’ve got a third kidney. What do I do exactly?

My goiter.

Yeah. Exactly. But we got a personal message, not a bot, a personal message back from 50% of them. Which in this relatively early days of dark social, I think is pretty admirable.

No, I don’t know of any other industry that could probably say that. I mean there are individual brands that are batting a thousand on that space. But entire industry and an industry with all the regulations and and stipulations that we’ve talked about, pretty incredible. I would chance to find another industry that’s doing that well. It’ll be interesting to see too, as you do version three of this, what does that data look like this time next year?

Right. I’ll tell you what. If I had to make a prediction, I would say dark social would be nearly a hundred percent by then because you will be talking a lot more about that here on Social Pros because that is the way the train is headed folks. No question about that. So thanks. Yeah, go ahead.

I was going, I’m just curious. As you look at those, the top three hospitals that you recognized in your report, what were the things that they were doing? And, what can other hospitals and other hospital administrators that are listening to this show can learn from, as well as people in any other industry? I think it was pretty insightful.

Yeah. You know what I think it is? It’s learning from your results. So, to some degree the top hospitals, Mass General, Ohio State, Cleveland Clinic, you know, they’ve got presences everywhere. And they’ve got staff in there and they’ve got resources and you know, they’re creating a consistent stream of content. But, a couple of things are true. One, the content that they create is valued by their audience. And it is what we would call utility content largely. It’s things that are interesting and helpful and useful and informational. Mixed in with some things that are inspirational. Right?

It’s a delicate balance in hospitals. You don’t want to overplay the “We’re saving lives here everybody”. Because that gets a little tiresome. And you also don’t want to overplay the, “Hey, did you know how many calories in a grapefruit?” Right. That gets a little boring as well. So they’ve a nice mixture of content, tone and execution. Certainly the things that they make are crafted well, right? So the photography’s good, the images are good, the videos are good, right? It doesn’t look like a middle school AV project. That helps. But the real differentiator, Adam, is that the leaders in this space understand what doesn’t work. And then they just stopped doing that.

Yeah.

Right? They don’t send 50 tweets a day that don’t work. They’re like, “Well, let’s figure out what does work on Twitter and do that.” Instead of just sort of like tweeting into the wind. And, I think that’s a lesson for us all right. That the data will tell you what you need to know. You just need to listen to the data and then your modify your strategy accordingly. As we tell our clients all the time here at Convince & Convert, if you have a social media strategy that was created more than 12 months ago, you actually don’t have a strategy. You might have a document that says strategy on it, but it’s no longer a valid strategy. And so you just have to modify what you’re doing based on what your results tell you. And that’s certainly what these leaders are doing.

Almost always, almost exclusively quality is going to trump quantity almost every single time. It’s much better to do two or three things very well than five or 10 things relatively satisfactorily.

Yeah, indeed. The next big report we’re doing at Convince & Convert is the Talk Triggers Awards. The first annual Talk Triggers Awards, which will be released on October 2nd. We’ll have a big webinar about it. I’m sure we’ll talk about it here on this show. We’re, Daniel Lemon, my coauthor and I, are going to reward 18 companies from around the world who are doing great things with word of mouth. None of those companies were mentioned in my book Talk Triggers, but we have incredible trophies and categories, six different categories including hospitals. The winners receive trophies that look like alpacas because there’s alpaca’s on the book cover. So that’s the next big chunky project we’re working on, Talk Triggers Awards.

Oh, that’s incredible. And, I’m not going to ask you who any of those winners are, but just a sneak tip. Anything that you see many of them doing consistently?

It’s picking one thing, right? That they’re going to focus on. One differentiator and just continuing to emphasize and push that advantage. One of the challenges that we see on the consulting side of the business is that when companies get excited about word of mouth, they tend to want to create more and more and more word of mouth worthy differentiators. And if everything is unique, then nothing becomes unique. Right? So you’re better off having one thing that’s really your deal, and then putting that out in front and then saying, “Okay, we’re just going to put more weight behind that instead of trying to add more characteristics”.

Yeah. How true. I can’t wait to see that report.

Yeah, it’s going to be fun. I’ll send you a sneak peek.

Yeah.

For this one friends, the 2019 hospital social media report where we analyzed thousands and thousands of thousands of social media posts from America’s 54 largest hospitals, go to bit dot L-Y slash social health 20, bit dot L-Y slash social health two zero. And you can grab it for yourself right now. I would love that. That would be spectacular.

Next week on the show, I am totally pumped because our guest is going to be the unbelievable powerhouse, Pat Flynn, whose new book Super Fans is out now. I just finished reading it. It is, I think you know I’ll mentioned this when he’s on the show next time, I think the best book about building an online community I’ve ever read. It is truly exceptional and he is an unbelievable guy who has quite a story to tell with us all. So, that’ll be next time on the Social Pros podcast.

Before we go we should ask ourselves the two questions that we ask everybody here on the show. Even though it’s just you and I. So, let’s do this. Let’s pretend that you and I work for a hospital, shall we? All right. So Adam, you can go first. What one tip, a hospital marketing director, would you give somebody looking to become a Social Pro?

Well, I think the data, as you said, speaks here. And for me it was to boost my posts on Facebook. 7X.

Boost your post on Facebook. There you go.

Well stop 7X our social studio efficacy is pretty incredible. So, I would say find a way to get budget.

To get The budget. Yeah. Great. And boost your post. I think that’s a good one. And what’s the second question? If you could do a video call with any living person, who would it be?

If you were a hospital social media administrator, Jay Baer.

I feel like there’s only two possible answers here.

Okay.

One would be Florence Nightingale, right?

Yeah.

Big in the hospital game.

Yep.

And two, I’m going to go with the George Clooney, who famously became famous in a hospital themed television show, the almighty ER and is now one of the world’s great celebrities. I think it’d be interesting talk to him about how that happened.

Wasn’t he on General Hospital before that? He was in the day time soaps.

Is that true? Was he in General? Yeah, I think he was. Wow. If that true he has a great hospital expertise.

He’s got a lot of white lab coats, you know, in his closet.

You got to figure it, you know, shooting all those scenes, you have to know enough. Right? I mean, not that you’d want to have, you know, you wouldn’t want to have George Clooney, like, you know, replace a lung or something. But I figured if you were like, you know, camping with George Clooney and somebody got somewhat injured, I feel like he’s picked up enough on set that he would be better than your average friend.

I know a doctor. I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.

Yeah. Is it literally? There’s something to be said for that.

We need an IV push stat. You know he knows that lingo.

You nailed that line Adam. I feel like you’ve got a calling.

I’m not a doctor, but I play one on Social Pros.

Baer: Yeah, on TV. Friends, this has been the Social Pros podcast, special edition hospital social media reports. With me, Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. He’s Adam Brown from Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Check out the new Social Studio. You can boost your posts as many hospitals are. You can also manage all your Google reviews right from Social Studio. Google Social Studio from Salesforce, and you’ll find all the goodies there. We’ll be back next week. As I mentioned, Pat Flynn will be our guest. Until then, be sure to leave us a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcasts. We’d appreciate that very much. We will see you next time. What we hope is your favorite podcast, Social Pros. Until then, be healthy. Stay out of hospitals. We love them, but we hope you don’t have to go.