Dear Radian6,

We’ve been using the Radian6 platform for mentions of our health system’s brand name and for active engagement with our online community. Are there any other ways to make use of social media monitoring that we may not have taken advantage of yet?

Dear User:

It’s great to hear that you are now engaging with your social media community and keeping a close eye on discussions surrounding your brand. Health is topic of interest to just about everyone and it’s likely you’re getting plenty of mentions in the social space. According to the latest research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 80% of internet users have looked online for health information. Of particular interest to your question for us today, it should be noted that the most commonly researched topics are specific diseases or conditions followed by specific medical treatments and/or procedures. The takeaway for your brand here is that the majority of online users are searching for discussions centered on disease states, not facilities or doctors, as their highest priority. Taking this into consideration, how could you add to your listening strategy?

Since you’re actively monitoring for brand mentions already, you’ve no doubt set up your topic profile with all relevant keywords surrounding your hospital or health facility’s brand name. Let’s take a look at how the Radian6 platform can be used to pull in conversations surrounding specific disease states and conditions, perhaps those that happen to be specialties at your facility.

We’ll start by selecting the Keywords and Keyword Groups tab and the ‘Choose a Group Type’ option, making certain to classify this new group of words as Industry rather than Brand-centric. Keep in mind, depending on how many specialties your facility deals in, this may necessitate setting up a brand new topic profile to thoroughly track all of those disease specific conversations.

Get a Snapshot of your specialty’s discussions

For simplicity, let’s say our facility specializes in only endocrine disorders. We might like to take a look at diabetes and the conversations surrounding it. Let’s start with a conversation cloud and a look at the top 50 words used in conjunction with diabetes in the discussions we’ve pulled in within our topic profile.

If any words stand out, we can pull up a River of News directly from that word and see all the posts containing that word. For example, let’s grab the conversations using the word ‘study’ in conjunction with diabetes.

Making New Connections

Since you’ve already begun using the Engagement Console to engage with your facility’s community, you can incorporate this new industry coverage into your engagement strategy. You may find this opens up new conversations and new community members that were not previously on your radar. Perhaps there is a doctor on the opposite side of the country who’s sharing a ton of great diabetes information through Twitter and his/her blog, you just hadn’t picked up on it since your monitoring to this point was centered solely on brand mentions. Voila, industry monitoring has opened up new potential contacts and collaborators that may have floated along outside your view until now as you focused more on engaging with your local community.

Share of Conversation

Your share of conversation is a key metric to keep an eye on if you are interested in your brand’s impact and growth within that particular area of study. By using a topic analysis widget we can have a look at how often our Brand is mentioned in the overall conversation about diabetes.

First we’ll include a keyword group for the industry (diabetes)

Next, we’ll compare it to a keyword group for our Brand (e.g. Your hospital: Note I am using a fictional brand name for display purposes only.)

Now we’ll use our topic analysis widget to see how our hospital fares in the online conversations surrounding diabetes.

As we can see, Boies Memorial Hospital is mentioned in only 2.5% of online diabetes conversations. Not bad for a fictional hospital, mind you.

Increase Your Share of that Conversation

Now that you’ve gotten a glimpse at where you stand vs. your industry, you may wish to track your share of conversation each week/month as your online engagement continues. Consider where your brand can add value to the disease specific conversations that are important to the online health community. Contribute helpful content and commentary where you see fit. You can ask questions designed to better understand the community’s needs and deepen your learning about diabetes patients. Be sure to take a regular look at your conversation share to see if your hospital or facility is becoming more intertwined with the online discussion of the specific specialty or topic you wish to be associated with.

Have you launched a disease specific social media campaign recently? Have you tracked your share of conversation before and after this campaign? Have you had success finding new online contacts by broadening your monitoring to include industry terms? Tell us all about it in the comments section!