Social Media Optimization for Mobile Devices: What Healthcare Marketers Need to Know

Mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, are shaking things up in the world of healthcare.

Mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets, are shaking things up in the world of healthcare. For example, the Glassesoff app helps train your eye to overcome the need for reading glasses, while the Kinsa Smart Thermometer plugs right into your iPhone so you can take a quick temperature reading.  These technologies and others offer some serious potential for the healthcare industry.

As more and more people use their smart devices to access social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it has become increasingly critical that healthcare facilities optimize their media content not only for a desktop computer, but primarily for mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets. Because the content you post for a computer doesn’t always work the same way when it’s viewed on the smaller screen of a handheld device, here are some suggestions you’ll want to note:

• Facebook Hashtags Last year, Facebook allowed hashtags (#) to make content on the world’s largest social media platform searchable for the first time, meaning that clicking on a specific keyword preceded by a hashtag lets you locate other social network pages referencing that term. Although hashtags aren’t yet clickable on mobile devices, you can still add them to your company’s Facebook posts with this limitation in mind.

• YouTube Channels Video marketing is rapidly expanding and offers rich potential for the healthcare vertical. The biggest video channel YouTube, which is of course the one that started it all, does pose some unique challenges. For one, a user can see neither the video description nor any hyperlink (generally located beneath the video title) when viewing it from a mobile device. Second, mobile devices present banner complications: you can’t see banner images, calls to action or social buttons. Third, hyperlinked annotations that you are able to embed using the desktop version of YouTube cannot be seen or clicked when viewing from a smartphone or tablet.

• Instagram URLs While Instagram photos and videos are plum opportunities to showcase testimonials and virtual tours of your healthcare facility, you can’t include clickable URLs in your descriptions. This means that it is more difficult for a visitor to access the background of your content, which isn’t hyperlinked. To compensate for this deficit, make sure your profile includes the URL, since it will be the only clickable place.

Optimizing your social media practices for mobile is becoming more and more critical every day. We’re just making you aware of the differences you’ll encounter among how digital content reads from desktop computers, smartphones and tablets so you can strategically deploy it to create an ideal user experience.