How To Get Followers on Twitter and Boost Engagement

We are often asked by health care organizations and practices which social media marketing platform is most important for their business, which is a hard question to answer because each platform is valuable in its own way. 

Facebook is used in health care marketing for:

• Engaging with patients on a personal level and collecting reviews
• Sharing consumer-facing news and updates
• Hosting contests for referring physicians

(Read More: 15 Topics for Facebook Posts in Health Care)

LinkedIn is used in health care marketing for:

• Connecting with industry experts
• Building your reputation as a thought leader, whether you’re a physician, hospital administrator or marketer
• Sharing original blog content from your website

While Twitter can be used in health care marketing for:

• Responding to your community’s tweets about health care and medical issues
• Reaching out directly to media contacts
• Sharing valuable articles, statistics and infographics
• Finding community updates and industry news
• Engaging in social conversations by tracking certain terms ex: affordable drugs

So, how do you get started on Twitter to excel at social media in healthcare? The first steps are to find who you want to follow, to get new followers and then get people to engage with your tweets. Here’s how to become a health care influencer on Twitter:

1.     Follow the best people: Don’t just follow willy-nilly, there should be a reason you’re following them.

• Find out who are the top influencers in health care on Twitter and identify which ones you can learn from and which ones would value your messages. See SlideShare of 2014 Influencers below.
• Pick the top 10 journalists who are writing the kinds of articles you could potentially be featured in or who you could provide syndicated content/guest posts to. TIP: Some of these can be national writers but don’t forget to focus on journalists at your local newspapers.

100 Healthcare And Digital Health Influencers To Follow In 2014 from Marie Ennis-O'Connor

2.     Use the right hashtags: Hashtags enable you to see all conversations related to a topic such as #TwitterTricks

• Find all appropriate health care hashtags on Symplur’s website for healthcare hashtags.  You can find upcoming conferences, tweet chats and popular medical topics.
• Be sure to set your location on Twitter so you can see what topics are trending in your area. It’s okay to use hashtags related to pop culture or community news sometimes, you don’t always have to be specific to health care. The goal is to provide value and join the conversation.

3.     Search and track terms: You can also find tweets using certain keyword phrases when they aren’t used as a hashtag with the following search tricks.

• Use location-based search to find people within your vicinity using certain words in their tweets. Ex: MRI near:Tampa within:10mi (hint: No spaces between :Tampa and :10mi)
• You can filter search results based on sentiment by adding :) or :( to your search query to see positive and negative tweets about a subject.
• Use advanced search forms to find specific combinations of words in tweets:

o   Tweets containing all words in any position (“MRI” and “cost”)  ex: “Anyone know the cost of an MRI in Tampa?”

o   Tweets containing exact phrases (“MRI price”) ex: “I found an MRI cost comparison tool online.”

o   Tweets containing any of the words (“MRI” or “cost”)

o   Tweets excluding specific words (“MRI” but not “cost”) ex: “Do you think Arian Foster’s MRI will show a torn Achilles?”

4.     Tweet with purpose: Be sure to actually engage.

• Tweet directly to a person you’re hoping to engage with
• Use hashtags, but don’t go overboard.  A tweet with 1-2 hashtags is more likely to be retweeted or shared, but if you go over 3 hashtags you’re cutting your chances of engagement by 50%.
• Reply to someone you’ve found via advanced search and communicate with them by serving as a resource or answering their questions.

TIP: If you’re tweeting without doing any of these three things or sharing a link to something on your website, you are essentially talking to yourself. You know that homeless guy downtown who is always yelling, at no one in particular? You are the social media version of him, in this case.

Can You Guess Which of These ICD-10 Codes Are Actually Real?

With the impending implementation of ICD-10 codes on October 1st, people have started to take note of all the new codes and they have found that some of them are pretty ridiculous. Going from having 13,000 billing codes under ICD-9’s coding system, which has been around since 2002, to 68,000 codes with ICD-10 will be a huge adjustment for everyone in the healthcare industry.

The new codes range from a little unbelievable to absolutely absurd, begging people on social media in healthcare to wonder “what’s the point of this new diagnostic coding system?” ICD-10 matters though and here’s why:

1. It is vital to health care reform as it will help patients achieve better quality of care, improved care access and lower costs
2. It will improve quality reporting programs like PQRS
3. It will include new procedures and references to medical breakthroughs/innovations
4. It will help researchers to have a better, more focused understanding of public health
5. It will enable physicians to be more efficiently reimbursed for the care they are providing

(Read More: Check out or other articles on healthcare marketing)

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With all these new codes though, how is someone to tell which codes are for real? Take our quiz to see if you can guess which of these ICD-10 codes are real and which ones are fake.

Poll Maker

Why ICD-10 Matters

Many people might be wondering why CMS is even moving forward with the implementation of ICD-10 codes, but we are here to tell you why ICD-10 matters. It’s a daunting task, getting everyone in healthcare to adopt this new set of billing codes, which is why it has been pushed back so many times before. The time has finally come however, on October 1, 2015 ICD-10 codes will be implemented and healthcare providers will have 55,000+ (no, those zeroes are not a typo) new codes to learn.

Other than the fact that the ICD-10 train is coming and we don’t have a choice but to jump onboard, let’s take a look at a few ways ICD-10 will improve the health care industry:

• It is vital to health care reform as it will help patients achieve better quality of care, improved care access and lower costs

• It will improve quality reporting programs like PQRS

• It will include new procedures and references to medical breakthroughs/innovations

• It will help researchers to have a better, more focused understanding of public health

• It will enable physicians to be more efficiently reimbursed for the care they are providing

Yes, learning all the new codes will take time. Yes, it might be a little annoying at first, but change is always a little uncomfortable. Just think, in a couple of years you won’t even remember what it was like before ICD-10. You’ll be all like, “You’re still hanging on to ICD-9 codes? Psh. Might as well be carrying around a flip phone in your cargo shorts while you listen to your Walkman.”

How To Use SEO the Pitch to Health Care Reporters

Earlier this week, we shared some insights we learned about pitching to health care reporters and jumpstarting your health care public relations efforts. Boston Globe columnist, Scott Kirsner, shared a lot of advice on how to relate better to journalists and his lessons translate well in regards to pitching to health care writers as well.

Read our Top 5 takeaways from “Getting Ink: Inbound Strategies for Building Relationships with Traditional Media Outlets and Bloggers”

Now, let’s explore the advice Arment Dietrich’s CEO, Gini Dietrich, shared at Inbound 2015. Her session about the power of combining media relations efforts with your search engine optimization strategy gave a unique approach to pitching to health care reporters.

Gini’s presentation; “Using Media Relations to Drive SEO,” was an intensive presentation filled with insanely helpful tricks and lessons for anyone trying to improve their health care public relations efforts. Check out her most valuable lessons:

1. Be aware of your domain authority. You can check the scores of any of your competition as well by downloading the MOZ Chrome extension at moz.com/tools/SEO-toolbar. When this is turned on, you’ll be able to see the domain authority of any website you visit. You can also see the DA scores in search results.
2. You should pick 3-4 phrases or long-tail key terms you want to rank for and use as your anchor text. You can use Google’s free keyword planner to see how often those key terms are being searched and how competitive it will be to rank for them. You want to focus on terms with a high search volume and low competition.
3. Trying to decide if you can rank higher than another website in organic listings? Check out their domain authority in comparison to yours. If you’re within a 10-point range, you can compete. If not, you might need to pick another term to focus on first. Gini made this analogy… “If you’re walking you can speed up to beat someone running, but you can’t beat a bike. If you’re biking you can’t beat a car and if you’re driving you can’t beat a helicopter. The same rule applies for competing with higher domain authorities.”
4. When reaching out to reporters asking to be a written about on their blog or in their articles, share a piece of valuable content within your blog that they can link to, rather than your home page. Writers want to send their readers to more content they can engage with, not a dead end.
5. Don’t be afraid to ask writers if you can share syndicated content with them. Most publications do this, the only one who won’t is TechCrunch. Share with the writer what your health care organization does, mention that you know they syndicate content and then provide five ideas for content to share.

Want to learn more about the importance of having a strong health care public relations team, check out our article on why your practice needs a PR strategy.