PRx Blog

Social media for B-to-B health care companies: Is there value?

There is tremendous buzz about using social media to promote all things consumer including health care treatments and diagnostics. But what if your company markets to hospital administrators and clinicians instead of patients? Does that mean there is no value for your company to engage in social media? 

When thinking about how the medical community is using social media, the perception tends to be that social media sites like Facebook and YouTube are only used to target patients, however also present are influential medical organizations and health care companies targeting clinicians and hospital administrators. The Society of Interventional Radiology (SIR) has a Facebook fan page that communicates updates on SIR's upcoming meetings, announces webinars and provides video clips of clinicians sharing their experiences using interventional radiology to treat patients. YouTube is also full of these types of videos designed for physicians to observe cutting-edge practices in surgery, diagnostics and other treatments.

With regards to targeting health care administrators, social media sites designed for professional networking--such as LinkedIn and Twitter--can be strategic venues for developing a presence for your brand. While LinkedIn is best known for providing individuals with a trusted network of business professionals to help them identify job opportunities, there is another component to LinkedIn that is conducive for helping to brand companies as key opinion leaders in their industries. With more than 55 million members including executives at every Fortune 500 company, LinkedIn provides a channel to get in front of key decision-makers in the health care business world.

Even better, it's very easy to begin building a corporate presence on LinkedIn. In minutes you can create a company profile that is essentially the same as the boilerplate section of a corporate website. Also simple to do is forming a LinkedIn group, a more interactive forum than a company profile that is designed to be a place for sharing industry and/or corporate news and allows members to begin discussions with one another. It is a great place to upload links to media coverage about your company as well as interesting articles about the industry.

One of the important choices when setting up a group is to either make it open to anyone who wants to join vs. invite-only. There are pros and cons to both options. If the group is going to be comprised of company executives who want to use it as a forum to share information between one another, then it would be best to set up the group as invite-only to prevent sharing information inadvertently with competitors who may unknowingly join a public group. If however, the number one goal of setting up the group is to elevate the company's brand to any and all business professionals, the public option will make it easier for more folks to join and would be the best choice. Also, it should be noted that if an inappropriate comment is posted, the group manager has the ability to delete the comment and/or subsequent comments in the discussion as well as remove "difficult" members from the group.

That said, it is important to remember that social media sites are not well suited to keeping information private. Anything you post to a LinkedIn group could be seen by clients, prospective clients and competitors. Social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn frequently change their privacy policies and settings. When changes are made they are not always transparently communicated to members.

If the idea of driving discussion seems too aggressive, there is still value in familiarizing yourself with outlets such as LinkedIn and Twitter. Like all communications campaigns, the key lies in finding outlets that reach your desired audience. Even if you're not ready to engage proactively, just listening to what business professionals in your industry are talking about can help inform how you go about reaching them. To this end, sites like Sermo are conducive to learning how physicians think about a particular topic. There are sponsorship opportunities available for companies to post questions and have access to the clinicians' answers, something that could be worthwhile if you are researching the best way to position a new product or relaunch an old one.

So the answer then is, yes, absolutely there is value for B-to-B health care companies to engage in social media, and we didn't even delve into opportunities on Twitter. Come back soon for a post dedicated to best practices on Twitter for health care companies with both B-to-B and B-to-C selling models. 

Posted by Sherry Feldberg on January 29, 2010 at 2:11 PM