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What Types of Facebook Posts Should Hospitals Focus On?

(This is a small sample of what will be available based on an upcoming study by the Social Health Institute and WCG on Facebook Hospitals – special thanks to Greg Matthews for all his help.)

Ever wondered what types of posts hospitals make? We have taken a group of 12 hospitals and studied a number metrics around their usage over a three month period of time. The full report will be out soon but today I wanted to share how “Type” breaks down.

When posting on Facebook you have a few options on what you plan to share:

  • Status
  • Photo
  • Video
  • Event
  • Milestone
  • Question
  • Offer

The 12 hospitals included in the study accounted for a total of 1589 posts over the three month period of the study. Here is how the types broke down (Not represented below were 1 Question and 1 Offer that were posted in this time frame):

So if “link” and “photo” posts dominate most hospital”s Facebook page is this good? Those 1589 posts accounted for 41,664 engagements (Engagement = Like, Comment, Share.) Looking at each type of post and specifically looking at the number of engagements each produced we pulled the engagement ratio. Based on each type here is their performance metric:

Photos far our weigh any other type of post based on engagements per post. Across the board they produce many more likes, comments, and shares.

There is much more to this, and the whitepaper will expand on this idea along with many other topics – data related and even some that are not. Would love some initial feedback to know if things like this are helpful?

Author Info

Reed Smith

2 Responses

  1. Greg Matthews says:
    October 4, 2012 at 8:44 pm

    This is great stuff, Reed … We had a lot of fun working with you on this project & are looking forward to seeing what cool insights you can derive from all of that data! So many hospitals (any organizations, really) are in the dark about how & when to engage with their social channels. This should be a big help!