How should Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta Use Twitter and Why?
CHOA – or Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta is a terrific organization. We recently spent a weekend there with our son when he had RSV. The hospital is amazing. They make you feel comfortable, they have hundreds of services, they offer room service to the parents, they have educational tv programs for adults, there is a computer lab, they have wifi, they do everything necessary to make a hard and scary time easy for the kids and the parents. Children’s is flat out an awesome organization.
While I was at the hospital I was on my computer and decide to see what kind of social media presence CHOA had. It turns out they really don’t have any social media presence at all. This is a true loss of opportunity for an organization such as Children’s because it is such a cheap and effective way to reach their target audiences both customers and donors. The day we were in the hospital happened to be the day of the Children’s parade in Atlanta. Seeing only five tweets mention the parade or CHOA amazed me and I posted one of them.
Children’s is way too valuable a resource to our community to have such little presence in one of the largest twitter markets in the country.
What would be the objective for Children’s to use Twitter. The number one thing to keep in mind is that social media of all kinds is meant for relationship building and to funnel leads into your sales funnel. So if I were positioning CHOA I would recommend focusing on a major goal of spreading the word for fundraisers and leverage the technology to inform and attract more people to charitable events.
The initial strategy and measurement for this type of work with twitter would be quite easy to implement. A landing page or blog post should be set up specifically for an event. Then a URL shorten-er that tracks click troughs could be used to send tweets about the campaign. That is the simple part, the larger part of the twitter effort would be to capture the brand image of service and provide users on-line the same service they get at the hospital. This strategy can be taken in many directions, such as providing nurses to respond to simple customer questions or having doctors tweet about the benifits of a particular surgery. The possibilities are truly endless.
Encouraging customers to tweet about their experience with CHOA would be another great objective and could be accomplished with a messaging campaing asking for feedback from parents. CHOA could choose to measure the success of this program simply by looking at the increase in tweets about CHOA from non CHOA accounts.
Ideally CHOA shouldn’t have to tweet about their parade on the day of the parade because their followers will do it for them but that won’t happen unless CHOA is out there actively interacting with the on-line social community.
Tweet Strategy, Conversion, and Measurement
I went to visit my Chiropractor today. We traded for some services so occasionally we discuss business. I brought up his tweet strategy and asked if he had any idea if what he has been doing on Twitter is helping out. Answer – “Not Really.”
Hmmm. I say “Let’s examine this and see if we can develop a strategy that will allow you to measure your success and hopefully build your practice.” So after some discussion here is the strategy and requirements we came up with. These requirements are fairly general so they can be applied to any business. The strategy is simple so it too can be applied to any business. Try it use the measurements and you will find success on Twitter and maybe some more conversions. By the way this strategy can be used in Facebook or any other social networking site that broadcasts statuses.
1) Tweet Positive uplifting tweets that enhance your brand. Use a twitter sentence structure that follows the format what’s the Problem, What to do, positive result. i.e. work got you stressed out, get adjusted now, sleep great tonight – vist me to find out more http://bit.ly/123456
2) We also provided an action for the user at the end of the tweet. By the way the above tweet still leaves me 28 characters to play with.
3) Notice that I use a bit.ly url. There is 1 very important reason to use a URL shortening service and that is to measure how many people clicked on your link. The second reason is to save space. So now I have a measurement to see how successful my tweet was. Using bit.ly is easy by the way simply login and enter the URL you want shortened. Actually it’s slightly more complicated then that but I’ll cover this in another post.
4) So by now you must be asking what is the URL going to and why. AHHHH. The landing page, conversion page or squeeze page (I hate the term squeeze page!). This is a simple page that has a form for the person to fill out. This should not be a long sales page in this case. A chiropractor is a professional and shouldn’t dropt to the sleazy level that many long form sales letters drop to. In this case we’re offering a free telephone consultation. The page should briefly follow the same format as the tweets Explain problems, how chiropractic can help, what the results will be and offer the free consult. The objective is to generate a warm lead. The doc can now follow up with the potential patient.
The form should be simple and to the point. It should collect the person’s name, email, and phone. The email should be used only as a single contact unless otherwise stated. This is not a news letter sign up it is a lead generation form for already hot prospects.
5) Measure, Measure, Measure. The tweets, the click troughs’, the page visits, the page conversions. Tweak and Repeat.
Good luck this is a simple but effective strategy.
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