Much of the growth in the healthcare industry is taking place outside of the United States- yet from 2009 to 2011, Carestream’s social media efforts focused on reaching medical imaging and health IT professionals in the U.S. Recognizing a disconnect between our social strategy and market share opportunity, in 2012 we embarked on a new strategy to extend the global reach of our social media program.

Our goals included growing international readerships of EverythingRad, the company’s blog (by 10%); participation on Facebook and Twitter (by 15%); and viewership on YouTube (by 50%).

Reaching these goals required a revamped content strategy that sourced contributions from outside the U.S. Our tactics included:

• Identifying internal subject matter experts based in different Carestream locations around the globe to demonstrate the breadth of our team and create visibility for local “faces”.
• Reaching out to third-party industry influencers to engage them in our content strategy; suggesting topics, ghost-writing posts and conducting podcast interviews.
• Producing content- video interviews, blog post summaries of scientific and technical presentations and event photo albums- in support of global tradeshows (HOSPEQ (China), JFR (France), DRK (Germany), SIRM (Italy), SERAM (Spain), ECR (Austria), ITEM (Japan) and Arab Health (UAE) to capitalize on interest from attendees and healthcare professionals at the show and following the event from other locations.
• Rebranding all our social media properties- Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and EverythingRad reflect a consistent look and feel to visitors located anywhere in the world.

Ensuring the international content mix was consistent to set expectations with visitors that there is relevant local content available to them each month- set goal to publish an average of two posts per month from outside the United States, focusing on countries such as Germany, Spain, Italy, France and Denmark.

This focused approach helped us to achieve our goals in 2012.International content contributors included Philip Ward, Editor In Chief, auntminnieeurope.com, Dr. Francisco Javier Rodríguez Recio, Head of Radiodiagnostics, Hospital of Segovia, and Dr. Paolo Balboni, Partner at ICT Legal Consulting & Scientific Director of the European Privacy Association.

This content allowed us to:

• Increase outside U.S. (OUS) readership of EverythingRad by 13% to a total of 57%.
• Increase OUS participation on Facebook by 20% to a total of 74%.
• Views on our YouTube channel consisted of 57% of visitors from OUS.

Yes, Carestream’s international social media audience continues to grow, but to truly understand the business impact you have to look beyond size. Analytics tell us that some of our leading customers, prospects, industry groups and academic institutions including the Cleveland Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, American College of Radiology, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and MD Anderson Cancer Center return time and time again to digest our thought-leadership, view our videos or participate in our image challenges. This data is shared with Carestream’s sales teams to give them a pulse on the topics of interest to key accounts and prospects for follow-up and funnel development. How does this help Carestream’s business? It creates an extra touch-point that didn’t exist before. Customers feel good about partnering with Carestream because we think and communicate differently.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Carestream Health was a 2013 Pinnacle Award winner in the Element category #19: Social Media Initiative. For a full list of the 2013 winners, read the News Release.  Rochester Business Journal’s article following the event is available here.  A full photo album from the event is posted here.

By Rich Pulvino, Social Media/Digital Media Specialist, Carestream Health

Chat with Rich on twitter @rPulvino