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Social media offers healthcare marketers the unique ability to listen and engage in the healthcare conversations of motivated consumers who are talking about their health or the health of their loved ones. These healthcare conversations are not possible with traditional media, are unique to social media and provide a goldmine of real-time information and direct engagement opportunities for marketers. Savvy marketers have taken notice and are increasingly using social media to take advantage of this newfound capability to build brand awareness, product interest, and grow sales.

Every day as millions of consumers seek answers and engage in healthcare conversations, they have increasingly turned to social media. These consumers seek: information, advice, relief from isolation, encouragement, and to share or learn from the experiences of others. Below are two real public social media healthcare conversations. These posts are representative of what consumers are saying publicly in real-time.

In the above example, consumers have joined a social media cancer community to discuss their experiences with cancer. This particular community is unbranded (not corporate branded or dedicated to a specific company and its products or services). As you can see the discussion is unfiltered and consumers are speaking and sharing freely about their experience with cancer. The community sponsor shares relevant cancer information for the community, creates engagement opportunities for members, and facilitates discussion and loyalty with comments and responses to posts.

The below example is from the same community and what is significant about this particular post is that the consumer was influenced by information that she found in the community that led her to ask her doctor about an alternative treatment. This is significant because it proves that these online communities have enough credibility with consumers to influence their offline behavior.

In summary, being able to access and listen to consumer social media healthcare conversations provides marketers with unique and valuable marketing opportunities. Healthcare marketers can target consumer social media healthcare conversations based on diagnosis, symptom, procedure, treatment, severity, emotion, time, day, perspective (e.g. patient, HCP, friend, relative), gender, age, or location. They can also study the actual language that consumers are using to discuss their healthcare which can greatly influence the wording and tone of their marketing messages – making them more noticeable, engaging and ultimately effective. Social media healthcare conversations are a valuable marketing tool for use by marketers looking to improve their overall marketing effectiveness.

Additional Information and Sources:
1. Making Sense of Social Media Conversations
2. Is Social Media the Future of Healthcare?