Healthcare PR & Twitter Moments Can Grow ROI

Last year, Twitter opened its storytelling feature called “Twitter Moments” to the public to encourage the sharing of stories and news globally. With this capability, brands as well as individuals can share and create their own stories, using tweets and multimedia that have been uploaded onto the channel. By prioritizing short, succinct, digestible pieces of content, Twitter is attempting to compete with other digital storytelling giants such as Snapchat and Instagram. Twitter, reporting 317 million monthly users, is pushing digital boundaries in hopes of staying ahead of the competitive curve. For healthcare organizations, this feature has the potential to dramatically improve marketing ROI: “Twitter Moments just leverages what Twitter is already about, which is real-time marketing,” notes Rebecca Lieb, a digital media and marketing analyst quoted in a recent AdWeek article.

All digital channels are now recognizing the importance of succinct storytelling, whether it’s a healthcare CEO sharing inspiration for their company’s future via a LinkedIn post, or a hospital taking a video of their new pediatric wing on Facebook, it’s all aimed at one thing: providing audiences with content that they want, when they want it and how they want it. With the 24/7 news cycle and instantaneous social media world we live in, it’s sink or swim in this brave new digital world. How did Twitter announce the details of its new feature? By publishing their own Twitter moment of course.
Below are a few ways Twitter Moments can help healthcare organizations improve their marketing ROI in 2017:

Showcase the value of your brand. For example, a healthcare client of SPR’s crafted a moment in order to highlight the value of physician assistants, including tweets with statistics around the growth of the profession over the last five years. Not only is this a great way to tell a story, but it emphasizes a mutual sharing of information and visuals around a topic.
Engage with your brand advocates and followers. A best practice in social media marketing today is to share your follower’s content and with Twitter Moments, you can do just that. By sharing your audience’s content/tweets, your healthcare organization will build a deeper level of trust, signaling to your audience that the organization is paying attention and listening to what’s being said about the brand/topic/issue.
Shape your healthcare brand’s reputation and messaging. Where anyone can leave a comment anywhere, at any time, brands are monitoring constantly to make sure they stay on their central messaging points as well as maintain their reputation because it doesn’t take much on social media to sully a brand’s reputation. With Twitter Moments, a healthcare organization can put out a particular perspective on a topic/story and control the messaging around it, sharing only the information that they want to.

According to a recent AdWeek article, even Twitter’s competitor YouTube eagerly jumped on board to use the Moments feature. By crafting a Twitter Moment to promote its custom series, YouTube Red Originals, engagement rates doubled compared to the engagement rates it achieved for its promoted Twitter trend which cost the company more than $100,000. Using the same content, Twitter Moments is the less expensive of the two options that ends up producing better results.

Twitter Moments are not solely for individuals and brands, however – media outlets are publishing Twitter Moments to curate and share news in real time. For example, executive editor at Newsweek Margarita Noriega produced a Twitter Moment detailing what happens when President-elect Trump attacks journalists online. She points out that it’s an opportunity to share information in real-time, noting that many fellow outlets are missing out on a huge opportunity to engage with their audiences on trending topics and news.

For healthcare organizations today attempting to stay on top of their digital game, it’s crucial that they consider using Twitter Moments to tell their brand’s story in order to engage with key stakeholders and followers.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

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