Health Populi – Today’s tech-savvy Mom is the CHO of her family,and 86% are the ones making household health decisions. Because of this,marketers are doing everything in their power to make sure they are grabbing their attention. Not surprisingly,there is a rush to offer mobile apps and health content for every social network from Facebook to Pinterest. But a recent report finds that for health topics,consumers (and moms specifically) are not turning to mobile and social tools the way they do aspects of their digital lives.
The data shows that moms are visiting Twitter and other places for health information. But once they get there,they don’t stick around. Ditto for mobile apps,Facebook and more. Essentially,marketers are great at getting attention and not so great at keeping it. And they quite struggle to provide the sort of engagement and empowerment that consumers are searching for when they head online for health information. Thus,in a 2.0 world,moms are still spending most of their internet-health time traditional websites.
Our Take: Kudos to Health Populi’s Jane Sarasohn-Kahn for her excellent breakdown of this study. Her points were twofold. 1) To reach a mom with your digital content,it has to be good enough to win the cluttered competition for her attention. 2) Rushing to mobile is often a tactic without a strategy. People are too often focused on the way to reach their audience and not focused on what they’ll say once the connection is made.
At Engaging the Patient,we’re thrilled to see hospitals and health organizations devising new and more creative ways to reach out to patients with health information. But issues of patient engagement that have long plagued the inpatient experience are even more of a problem in the online world. At the hospital,if you are not engaging patients,they may still hear you,understand you and take action. But quite a few people will get the messages your team are trying to convey. Online, if your content isn’t engaging,it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t show up in your Facebook fans’ newsfeeds. It goes unviewed,unshared,unconsumed. Frankly,it’s a waste of time and money.
This report shows that this is especially true for moms. They’re by and large too busy for a waste of time. And unless you can provide them with information and engagement they can use and keep using,your content is dead to them.
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Filed under:mobile,Patient Communication Tagged:Communication,Facebook,Patient,patient engagement,Patient Experience,Pinterest,Social network,Twitter 
Engaging The Patient
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