SERMO – Social Media for Doctors

 

SERMO is the most trusted and preferred social network for doctors. SERMO is Latin for “conversation” It is exclusively for doctors and is anonymous. SERMO has about 550,000 members who actively contribute to the discussions about advancements and practices in the field of medicine. Most of the conversations are honest and frank as all the posts can be made anonymous and the members are not held accountable for their comments by the hospital administrators. It is also one of the leading sites for medical crowd sourcing. Real-life medical questions and tough cases are posted and the doctors seek help of other members.

SERMO has doctors from over 90 specialties and sub specialties. Doctors can post challenging questions about diagnoses and receive answers within minutes. SERMO allows doctors to share photos, lab and imaging results with colleagues. It also helps the members from keeping up to date with the advancements in medicine. It provides fresh and insightful content every day.

References:

“SERMO: The #1 Social Network for Doctors, the Online Doctor’s Lounge, Polls, Curbsides and More.” SERMO: The #1 Social Network for Doctors, the Online Doctor’s Lounge, Polls, Curbsides and More. Web. 24 Apr. 2016. <http://www.sermo.com/&gt;.

 

Social Media Analytics in Higher Ed

Currently, the Social Analytics Team blog is working on a paper regarding the usage of social media analytics in higher education; specifically, we’re researching how colleges and universities are using social media analytics to increase student engagement. There’s a lot of interesting research out there on social media usage by institutions of higher education; there’s also a lot of research linking student engagement and student success.

What we’re not finding, though, is a lot of research showing how colleges are actively mining the data available in social media analytics to increase and capitalize on engagement opportunities with students. So, I thought I’d throw the question out there (both as a researcher and as the former communications director for a local government agency, where we actively used this kind of information): are any of our readers aware of higher ed communications plans that include this kind of analytics? I know that many of us in the class are TAP students and USG employees – if you have any insight into this, we’d love to hear from you.

Overall Use of Social Media Analytic: Why Should Companies Invest Their Time

After following the processes of getting the Social Media Analytic tool, capturing and analyzing the data some business may ask so now what? Is it worth it to invest all this time in tracking social media activities? I say yes!! However, the use of analytics to evaluate and guide social media strategy is still not as widespread as it should be (Fox, 2013). Social media analytics is important because it helps you figure out what is or isn’t working for your company. Content is important, but so is engagement (Fox, 2013). The key is getting people to see the amazing content you’re posting. Then once the content is posted, how are they responding to it? This is where the analytics help with letting a company know if they are doing the right things, attracting the right people, and making impressions.

Start with a baseline by getting a few months of analytics. Use some of the social media analytics tools mentioned in the previous posts such as Google Analytics or HootSuite to find things out like, how many visitors come to the company’s website per month or how many visits come from each of the social media platforms per month. After you set up a data baseline, adjust one routine at a time, and see if this adjustment gets more engagements such as visits, likes, shares, comments, follows, etc. during that time. The various platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc.) have simple analytics offered on their pages as well. These analytics can tell you how many people your post has reached, how many engaged users it had, and the number of people who have created a story from your post as a percentage of the number of people who have seen it for each post. Learn if the time of day matter to your followers or if certain content is receiving more attention than others. It’s valuable for companies to pay attention to these numbers and use them to adjust any strategies that may need adjusting to better the company.

Keeping track of the company’s progress is a great reason to invest time into social media analytics. The Social media analytical tools helps with seeing the big picture. Not only showing how the company’s followings has grown or how many fans have accrued over time but some of the tools allow tracking how many contact and hopefully leads the social media efforts have brought in. If some one in the company feel like this is a waste of time, just print out the analytic proof remember numbers don’t lie.

Speaking of investing time, social media analytics help with distributing the company’s time. Analytics can help show the company which strategies are working and also show the social media source of visits, contacts or leads. For example, in April most of the company’s social media visits may have come from Facebook, with significantly less coming from both LinkedIn and Twitter. In April, the company can decide to dedicate a little more time to LinkedIn and Twitter, increasing the amount of posts and engagement on both sites. The data retrieved from social media analytics can help businesses discover the best ways to allocate their time. So say you start spending that time on twitter and still not getting many leads, then maybe you need to allocate that time promoting the company on another platform that you might have more success in bringing in leads. The companies/organizations should at least try it, but to try without knowing and analyzing the results afterward wastes time.
I think this articles says it well:
“Whether you’re a big or small company, if you’re investing time, money, and effort into social media, than you should use social media analytics to see the whole picture and witness the fruits of your labor. Start using analytics to track your social media efforts today and figure out the best formula for success for you and your company tomorrow.” (Fox, 2013)

Reference:
Fox, A. (2013, April 26). Why Tracking Your Social Media Analytics is Important. Retrieved April 21, 2016, from http://www.seguetech.com/blog/2013/04/26/why-tracking-social-media-analytics-important

 

Using Analytics Tools: Hootsuite

In the age of big data, numbers are everything. And in the age of social media, using analytics to tell who is reading your posts, when, and what kind of posts they like is just one way to maximize your social media efforts. (After all, if you post, and no one reads it, is it worth posting? As a former communications director, I say no.)

Hootsuite is a tool I’ve used in the past to track my social media analytics. It has a great analytics dashboard, and it’s very efficient – you’re able to manage multiple social media networks at once. Here’s a bit from their site, http://www.hootsuite.com:

One of the best features, in my opinion, is the release of their internal metrics tool – so that, if you have a team of social media content developers, you’re able to analyze who’s really reaching your audience, and with what kind of content. Those reports are available to Pro and Enterprise users – and starting at $9.99 a month, I believe it’s worth the cost if you have an active social media program.

Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare

Like other industries, Healthcare Industry has also adopted Social Media as one of the key communication channels. With the growing number of people engaging in social media, both health care providers and patients readily benefit from Social Media. Social Media tools in Health Care are available in various forms such as online network platforms, blogs, micro blogs, wikis, media-sharing sites and so on. With more than 1 billion users registered in the Facebook, which accounts to about one seventh of World’s population, it is evident that the impact of social media is high on any industry.

Many of the health care professionals and pharmacists already engage in Social Media for both personal and professional activities. There are a variety of platforms that are available specifically for HealthCare and Pharmacy related areas. A social media site called “Sermo” is a leading online platform that allows only physicians to register and access the content. There are already several thousand physicians that are registered in this network and communicate on a daily basis. There are other newer platforms like “Doximity”, “Medical Directors Forum” etc.,

Benefits of Social Media in Health Care Industry:

Networking: Healthcare professionals can network with others in the same specialty and share their findings about new cases and any useful information with the online community. This improves the healthcare across the globe by learning from others. Pharmacists also benefit from Networking by sharing their clinical trials data and other research information. Facilities can also benefit by sharing the hospital management techniques and other valuable information.

Promotion of services: One of the main uses of social media is to promote the services that are offered by the facilities and health care providers. The hospitals can use social media to promote their best physicians, world-class facilities and clinical data to prove their ability to treat major ailments.

Patient Care: Patient care involves tracking the progress of patients to make sure that they recover. This is a key area where doctors can leverage social media by engaging with the patients online and keep receiving updates from patients and change the treatment course, as necessary.

Patient Education: Physicians can form a network and answer questions for the patients and social media provides a platform for this. This was not possible before the Web came along. Patients can go online and research for specific conditions and obtain trusted information from physicians. Research also suggests that majority of the online users constant search for health topics online.

Reference:

Ventola, C. Lee. “Social Media and Health Care Professionals: Benefits, Risks, and Best Practices.” Pharmacy and Therapeutics. MediMedia USA, Inc. Web. 27 Mar. 2016. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4103576/&gt;.

 

Let’s Take a Look Inside Social Media Analytics. What are the Steps Taken to Achieve This Goal?

Now that you know about choosing tools to assist with gathering social media data (if you decide to choose one), there’s basically a three step process in achieving social media analytics. These steps are Capture, Understand and Present.

1. Capture is the first step where an organization identifies conversation related to their brand, products, service, etc. on various social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and blogs. From the various platforms alone, a business can capture a huge amount of data. To move on to the next stage, different things need to be performed during this stage with the data such as linking data from various sources, creating some type of data model, tagging parts of conversations, extracting out specific highlights from the data, remove a lot of useless data to get a more meaningful analysis and perform other types of operations with the data that will support the analysis. Remember there are tools to help with pulling out keywords or mentions of a business, product, or services, etc. as mentioned in the previous blog “So Many Social Media Analytics Tools! Which Tool Is Best For You”.

 

2. Once the data is capture and prepared, the next step is to try to Understand the data and get some metrics for making useful decisions. An example of metrics could be volume, how much people are talking about a brand, product, service, etc. Engagement is another metric to see how people are participating in the conversations about a brand, product, service, etc. The understand stage is the main part of the entire social media analytics process (Wan, Gordon 2014). This stage will provide information about user’s feelings. How the customer feel about a business and its products or service. This is where an understanding began to happen about the likelihood of a customer to purchase a product after seeing an ad campaign. Many useful metrics and trends about users can be formed during this stage. The results of understanding the data and metrics will have a major effect on the next step, present.

 

3. The last step is Present. In this stage the results are summarized, evaluated and shown to users in a format they can understand. Visualization techniques such as a visual dashboard which can display aggregate information from various sources, different types of graphs, etc can help display information. There are definitely more sophisticated visual analytics such as real time visualizations. There are various tools to help with creating visualizations. This link can help get you started: http://www.kdnuggets.com/2015/06/top-30-social-network-analysis-visualization-tools.html

Some organizations may have their own business plan/process of developing their social media analytics. The three steps above are the basics and a guide to help get started so the entire process will not seem overwhelming.

Reference:

Wan, W., & Gordon, M. D. (2014, June). The Power of Social Media Analytics. Retrieved March 04, 2016, from http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/6/175163-the-power-of-social-media-analytics/fulltext

Rising Importance of Social Media Analytics for HealthCare

Social Media Analytics have an impact on every field in Science and Technology. Health Care Industry is no exception however majority of the drug makers around the world are not adopting Social Media Analytics to look for trends and interests of their patients. Brandwatch has conducted some research on this topic and as per the research conducted more than half of the largest drug makers still aren’t actively using social media. Most of the pharmaceutical industries spend a lot of money in digital spending but still are not adopting social media enough to reap the benefits of it. The common excuse seems to be the regulatory uncertainty and the red tape that is usually associated with the Health Care industry.

The patterns are changing quickly and there is a need for the healthcare industry to switch gears and adopt the Social Media Analytics primarily because the patients are empowered with the social media. Over one third of the patients research health topics online and take care of their health themselves. The patients have access to great deal of information like never before. This puts them in an advantageous position and they have a bigger say in the treatment process as a whole. Physicians and Pharmaceutical Industry should realize this and swiftly make progress to mine the analytics data that is scattered all over the web and extract valuable insights into the treatment process. Below diagram shows how health is being picked as an online blogging topic compared to others.

Mining the massive online data would answer some of the questions that are very helpful to the healthcare industry. The ratings of the drug, side effects that are caused due to this, physicians’ opinions about the drug can all be determined with social media analytics. They also help in determining patient’s concerns about using the drug and any alternative drugs that the patients are using for similar disease or symptoms. Overall, investing strongly in Social Media Analytics is a valuable proposition that the health care industry should consider seriously in order to better serve their patients.

Reference:

“Understanding Patients’ Needs with Social Media Analytics.” Brandwatch. 2015. Web. 28 Feb. 2016. <https://www.brandwatch.com/2015/03/research-noting-rising-role-social-analytics-healthcare/&gt;.

3 Twitter Tips for Nonprofits

It’s critical for nonprofits to use their time, effort, and marketing capital as wisely as possible – after all, their next donation (or supporter) could be just one tweet, post, or “like” away on social media.

Twitter is a powerful tool that many nonprofits use to communicate with their followers and share information about their mission and purpose. It’s also equipped with powerful tools to help nonprofits maximize their impact and reach.

Here are 3 tips to help nonprofits make the most of their time on Twitter:

1. Use analytics to determine the type of post that resonates most with users. Many nonprofits have found that infographics are the most popular. Oxfam’s recent post from January 19, for example, had twice the number of likes and retweets than some of its other recent (non-infographic) tweets. If your users tend to retweet statistics, use those. Memes more popular? Go with those. Mix it up a bit, for sure, but see what’s most popular to maximize the impact of each post.
2. Tweet on the weekends – or whenever your followers are online. By using analytics to determine when your followers are online, you can tweet (or schedule tweets) to post when your fans will actually see them. And, while we’re at it, please make sure to actually check your mentions, RTs and such.
3. Don’t be a robot. While we’re on the topic of checking for mentions and RTs – actually talk to your followers. It’s one of the beautiful parts of social media – you can actually engage with your favorite organizations, causes, and groups. I recently had a super-nerdy moment because one of my tweets was favorited by the organization that’s hosting a conference in April (that I’m presenting at). Awesome, right?
   

 

 

 

I’ll throw in a bonus tip: head on over to http://analytics.twitter.com to see your analytics (you’ll have to log in). You’ll see lots of great content there, including your top posts, your top followers, your Tweet impressions, your profile views, and more. Here’s a snapshot of mine (not that impressive, since I don’t use Twitter that often for personal uses):

Use these tips to see your Twitter analytics skyrocket!

So Many Social Media Analytics Tools! Which Tool Is Best For You

There is an overwhelm of social media analytic tools to help find, sort and analyze data from online conversations about businesses on sites like Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Although companies are gathering a lot data through various software, there are times businesses don’t know what to do with the data they have collected. How can a business find what’s significant to their company and then make sense of it? That’s where I think tools for monitoring social media sites and analyzing what their users are saying come in handy.

These tools use Open Application Interfaces that allow external software programs to pull in already existing data, which gives the tools the ability to integrate with the various third-party sites such as Facebook, Twitter and other sites. There are some social sites that are a little newer and may be a little more complicated to integrate with, such as Instagram and Pinterest. They’re still behind in providing full operational and reporting features. Some of the applications are used mostly for monitoring and responding to comments, and then some have a dashboards with full reporting to help with analyzing trends. Using social media analytic tools with the data findings can be very helpful in understanding customer interests, favorites, behavior, future trends and more.

There are several tools you can search online and compare to others. Below is a link to the list of the top 10 tools for 2015.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2491376,00.asp

Because there are so many tools to choose from, businesses should decide exactly what they’re looking for and what they want to display. Businesses must think, do they want to keep track of how many followers they have, better manage and schedule their brand’s social media posts, just listen to what customers are saying about their brands, etc. Businesses should make sure they know what decisions they want the tool they choose to help them with. Also schedule demos of the tools and ask questions before purchasing (if you’re not using a free tool).

Overall businesses are not just trying to get the most likes or followers, they are trying to see how they can better their business. They want to see if this particular brand, product, services, etc. could bring in revenue. I think taking advantage of using the social media analytic tools that are now available, understanding what tool(s) would be helpful in decision making and knowing how the company want to use the tool is a great strategy to grow or continue to grow a business.

Reference:

Cornelius, S. (2015, October 20). Sprout Social vs Buffer vs Hootsuite vs Tweetdeck vs Sendible. Retrieved February 11, 2016, from http://www.werockyourweb.com/sprout-social-vs-buffer-vs-hootsuite-vs-tweetdeck-vs-sendible/