March 30, 2021

Reach more patients and decision makers with social media hashtags

Hashtags, The Low-Cost Strategy for Social Media Success

Hashtags can work wonders getting your social media posts in front of the right (and new) audiences. Using strategic hashtags with your posts, you can easily connect your healthcare organization to the communities youre trying to reach.

So, What Are Hashtags?

Hashtags are words or phrases preceded by a hash mark #. And while many use hashtags to lend some humor or irony to a post, hashtags can play a much more critical role by labeling your post's subject and making it searchable within the social media channel. For example, if you made a post on Twitter about how your medical laser is used to treat glaucoma and gave it the hashtag #glaucoma, anyone searching on Twitter for Glaucoma could see your tweet. A hashtag is like a signal that makes your post searchable.

Twitter is the originator of hashtags, but other platforms have jumped on board, including Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Using hashtags on LinkedIn can be especially valuable for B2Bs, getting you in front of the right eyeballs looking for your product or service, but isn't following your healthcare organization yet.

 

Be picky, and choose the best hashtags.

It's essential to use the hashtags that are right for business. Do your research and pick hashtags that fit the content you're promoting, but that will also be getting some traffic. Oh, and make sure the hashtag you want to use isn't being co-opted for less than savory posts. (It's the Internet, it happens!) You can also search the hashtag and jump in on other people's conversations with relevant material. That's putting the "social" in social media! Also, try to keep your hashtags simple and concise. And don't be that poster who has a one-sentence post followed by 15 hashtags.

 

 

Jump-start your Healthcare hashtag collection.

Here are a few popular in medical marketing. Use them as a starting point and look for (and create!) others that make the most sense for you.

 

Healthcare marketing hashtags:

#MedTwitter

This one gets used a lot by everyone in the Medical Social Media world and consists of an online community of researchers, practitioners, students, and professionals

#Covid19

If you have something related to the pandemic, this one is hot.

#HealthcareHeroes

Important,especially during the past year

#Telehealth or #Telemedicine

During Covid and after, these are becoming standard ways of conducting business.

#BreastCancerAwareness, #CancerPrevention, #Diabetes, #CovidVaccine

Tags like this and many others call attention to health awareness campaigns. Do your research. Look at several social media channels to see if the tag is already in use and how.

To find more tags, check see our post on 110 Healthcare Hashtags.