Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/1110805
Strategies "No one comes onto social media saying, 'I wish I could just get a promotional ad for my local hospital,'" Baer says. "Sometimes, we still see businesses and hospitals making it a bit too much about [themselves] and not enough about the story." AN ONGOING PROCESS The study concluded there is no one-size-fits-all formula for marketing success in social media. In part, Baer says, this is due to algorithmic changes on platforms. "The social media algorithm changes frequently and without warning," he says, "so what works in one particular snapshot in time may not work 30 days later." Bridges agrees, recommending hospitals research what works for them and their competitors. "Your own data about the posts you're doing is going to inform that [research]," he says, "and the only way to do that is to do the experiment [because] there's so much variability." Baer urges hospitals to be nimble. "Find your best story and tell it," he says. "Then commit to routine and ritualized testing because you don't know what's going to work until you test it. You might think you do, but ... each post succeeds based on a different set of circumstances. You have to always be experimenting." n BY HILLARY EAMES Marketing Instagram Success in Hospital Storytelling INSTAGR A M M AY BE an underutilized resource for hospital marketing, according to Seth Bridges, founder of Rival IQ. "All of these hospitals are producing less content [on Instagram] than they are on Facebook," Bridges says, referring to the organizations whose social media posts Convince & Convert and Rival IQ reviewed. "That's a pattern we see pretty much across the board. ... Clients who have built up a large audience on Facebook invest more on Facebook than on Instagram." However, research suggests focused investment in Instagram may benefit hospitals because of a specific platform feature. Carousel posts — which combine up to 10 images or videos in a single social media post — drew the most Instagram engagement for hospitals in the Convince & Convert/Rival IQ study. Although some research suggests otherwise — including a study by social media management company Agorapulse that found posting carousel images versus non-carousel images resulted in a 26 percent decrease in likes — 34 percent of the best-performing Instagram posts in the Convince & Convert/Rival IQ study were carousels. Jay Baer, founder of Convince & Convert, suggests this is possibly because carousels let consumers further interact with content they find interesting. "It allows you to envelop the consumer with addi- tional storytelling information," Baer says. "People are becoming so familiar now with the actual story format [that] treating ... a carousel image like a story is effective." UCLA Health had success posting a carousel of images thanking the Los Angeles Lakers for visiting UCLA Mattel Children's Hospital. The post contained three photos and a caption noting that the team brought "smiles to so many faces." The photos were group shots of players with happy patients and staff, effectively including the viewer in the narrative of those pictured enjoying time with the team. M D N E W S . C O M /// M D N E W S C E N T R A L N E W Y O R K ■ 2 019 1 3