Physician and Service Line Leader Requests for Their Own Social Media Representing the Health Center

The following question and answers come from posts on SHSMD’s online discussion groups.*
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Q. We have multiple physician leaders asking to launch their own Facebook pages, even though we have an enterprise page. Do your physicians have their own social media representing your health system? How do you manage it and what level of assistance do you offer? I believe that once you do it for one physician, many will want the same. If done well, this could be good, however I’m concerned they will not post on a regular basis.

A: We do not allow pages not managed directly by marketing. What we do to help offset the request is to encourage them to write blogs, make videos, etc. on their specialties and focus. We then post, tag and direct them to their “Find a Doctor” page to learn more about the physician or to schedule an appointment.

A: In my experience, your concerns are on target. There are organizations who do well with a multi-page approach, but I believe it requires a great deal of coordination and planning to be successful. More pages means more complexity. We use a centralized approach on Facebook with one account for the health system and it has served well. We're able to nimbly tell the stories from different service lines and departments to a larger audience, and focus certain posts and stories to different audience segments when appropriate. Our media relations coordinators post our organic content. Our clinical and administrative leaders know to reach out to us to help craft a story to share. Some may not realize what you articulated well in your question — creating a visible and credible social media presence takes consistent time, attention and engaging content.

A: This topic will come up numerous times in your career. In systems in the past, one of the things we did was create a sort of "brand ambassador" training for those direct care lines that felt their own presence was important. We pushed until they got it by developing a system that if physicians wanted, they had to go through training first. It gave them the essential brand consistency requirements but also helped understand the channel, what it takes to be successful, HIPAA, branding requirements, and the pros versus cons to doing their own. I've seen some use a sort of agreement or contract as well.

One area they may not think about is the followers — it's tough to start from scratch and it is important they understand that growing their following will be slow. The other factor is the algorithm and how only about 1-2% of organic posts are seen. It makes the ROI on that content creation and time something to carefully consider. It’s important you are clear on who will do what, and how often. What helps the process is the understanding that you are the brand manager and will help adjust, teach and edit, as needed, from the beginning and why that is important.

In some cases, a smaller page may make sense, but maybe a closed Facebook group is what makes sense to serve the needs of that specific patient population versus public posts on all of it. The main hospital/health system page can direct to that resource. We found a power struggle over deciding yes or no was not a successful route and eroded collaboration, so we found a middle ground. When we took the approach of a collaborative partner to help support, educate and inform, we protected the relationship. In some ways the energy and ownership of the team having their own page is transformative.

A: We don't run into a lot of physician leaders asking for accounts, but we do face those wanting departmental and service line accounts. We typically do not allow this and direct them to use the enterprise page. To help combat this issue, I created an extensive request form that really drives home how much work it is to maintain a social channel. That has worked to deter many of these types of requests. For instance, when I ask for three months’ worth of a content calendar that they plan to post, I tend to not hear back.

A: We have a lot of departments/service lines who also ask for social media accounts. Would you share with me what items you have placed on your extensive request form? I like your suggestion of asking for three months work of a content calendar.

A: Here are the main items we ask on the request form to convey that this exercise is a lot more work than just posting:

1. Provide examples of 1-2 competitors that you are modeling after and why.
2. Provide your goals and objectives for social media (3 month, 6 month, 1 year).
3. What are your goals for:
   a.    Followers
   b.     Engagement
   c.     Clicks
   d.     Conversions
4. What is your motivation for having a dedicated social media account?
5. What is your plan for growing followers and otherwise promoting the account

Proposed content

1. How often do you plan to post?
2. What does your current content inventory look like?
3. Please attach separately a draft content calendar containing 1-3 months of proposed content.
4. What is your budget for paid promotion?
5. Who will be managing the account?
6. Who will be the backup?
7. Do you have a plan in place for after-hours monitoring of the account?
8. What is your anticipated response time to inquiries on the account?

A: Requests for Facebook pages will never cease. I would add a couple of things:

• Collaborate on a flow chart of how positive and negative reviews and/or comments will be handled. 
• Provide a short course in taking good pictures, video, etc. Recommend smartphone based tools to help them. 
• Require someone from the social media team have admin privileges so they can provide support as needed. Make sure they monitor the page for the first few weeks to provide coaching on how they might improve to get better engagement. If you end up with multiple "approved" pages, consider a quarterly in-service to talk about what's coming down the road that might create content opportunities, teach a new skill, celebrate successes and talk about opportunities to improve. If they feel supported they'll be more likely to come for guidance when they need it.
• Create a service level agreement that the business "owner" must sign, along with marketing, that includes their responsibilities, marketing's responsibility, agreement on content rules, and what will happen if they fail to maintain the page or abide by the rules for releases. For example, if they don't post for 90 days does marketing take over the page?

A: Instead of telling them how hard and how much work it will be, which still leaves you in the position of having to say no or worse yes and then watch them lose interest, you let them figure it out on their own.

A: If you do end up being pressured into creating something, you could consider setting up a location/child/store page. This is along the lines of what Starbucks does for example. They have one corporate page and then each store has their own “child”. All brand posts are set to flow down the child pages and the child page admins can add additional content to their child page. You would still need to have the conversation about what is appropriate and what type of review/approval process is needed but this would allow them to build their own following and respond to comments left on their child page posts. We've done this so that joint ventures/partnerships for certain service lines with their own marketing resources can have autonomy and use their own budget for boosting posts/running ads.

The biggest difficulty I've run into is that Facebook doesn't allow for multiple stores/locations at the same address. When you have a medical office building with numerous entities it doesn't accept and recognize different suite numbers in order for a child page to be created.

A: We have battled this for years and just recently revised our social media guidelines to remove this burden from our team. Each physician, manager, administrator is responsible for owning the knowledge and acting upon it for social media accounts. We are simply an auditing group for the organization and will report that to the manager, administrator and COO. This is a major burden lifted.

A: Embrace it — develop an ambassador or thought leadership program. Spend your time and energy developing a training, follow-up education, and invite people to apply to the program. Accept a certain number of ambassadors per training period and set guidelines they must follow. These guidelines can be as loose or as stringent as possible. It can be odd to let go of the reigns at first, but an ambassador program can be very successful with little impact to the expense line.

We created tool kits that we sent out on a regular basis with possible content in addition to the trainings, but it is amazing the impact a program like this can have on our ability to amplify our reach. As for departmental sub-pages, those are less effective and tend to regurgitate content on the parent pages.

*The answers to the above question are excerpts from MySHSMD discussions. In some instances the responses have been edited for grammar and/or brevity purposes for Community Connections.

Please visit MySHSMD to read the detailed thread and connect with the responding members.

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