Use Facebook to promote your hospital or healthcare staffing company.

Facebook is now the fourth largest website in the world. Therefore, I’ll assume it needs no introduction. Most of us have digitized our personal lives on the site and have even mixed in some business uses. However, more than just a place to connect with friends, upload pictures and post (incredibly annoying) poles and games you’ve played, Facebook can be a great way to promote your hospital or healthcare staffing agency, as well as control your brand.

Facebook allows you to create Pages that other users can become “fans” of.  These fan Pages are similar to personal profiles but designed for the purpose of allowing businesses and organizations to establish a presence on the site.  These Pages also allow you to do several things such as:

• Add your company Logo
• Provide a company summary
• Upload pictures or videos of your employees, work space, experiences, testimonials, ads, or commercials
• Connect to and network with employees, colleagues, and partners
• Link back to your corporate website or others sites on the web
• Post schedules of events and other activities your organization is involved with
• Create and send event invitations
• Integrate your press releases and news stories to be automatically shared on the page
• Distribute information and important links

Once you’ve created a page and established a presence on the site there are three main benefits of being active on Facebook as a hospital or healthcare staffing supplier:  

1. Brand promotion.  In an earlier post I discussed the importance of monitoring your online brand as a hospital or healthcare staffing supplier.  Creating a Facebook page is a great place to help define and control the message of your company.  

2.  Creating Ads.  Facebook allows you to create both image and text based ads.  You can target these ads to a specific audience with demographic filters of Facebook users.  You can also track your campaigns and see who’s viewing your ad and what, if anything, you need to do to modify the ad to achieve your campaign goals.  There is a cost to promoting the ads but you can pay by the click or impression and even set budget limits.  

3. Recruiting.  Facebook allows you to install third party widgets that allow you to post any available jobs you have with your company or for which you are recruiting.  Posting these jobs help attract candidates.  There are also several apps associated with jobs and recruiting.  Using these apps can help you connect to the candidates you’re looking for.  

In addition, Facebook is a great sourcing tool that allows you to find candidates, send them a message and recruit them proactively.  Many people on Facebook post professional information about themselves so searching for people by job type, industry or even a specific company is relatively easy.  You can even search for specific companies and find people that work there. 

You can’t search the entire Facebook database.  You are limited to your connections and your networks.  So, the more friends you have and the more networks you belong to, the broader your search base becomes.  

There is one caveat.  I've been involved with several discussions around the controversy of recruiting from social networking sites such as Facebook.  At a recent conference several hospitals were discussing how they were prohibited from using Facebook for recruiting purposes because of the personal information displayed on individual’s pages.  So, it might be a good idea to know what your hospital policy is before you go too far with your Facebook recruitment efforts.

If you are not on Facebook, give it a try.  Create an account, start making connections and being active on the site.  There are several hospitals already using Facebook Pages to promote their organizations.  Don’t be afraid to explore all the opportunities this site can offer in regard to networking, branding, promoting and recruiting for your hospital or healthcare staffing company.

Comments

[Ajay Jetti]

Very good article. Only yesterday i found that this sort of thing can be done in Facebook--your article elaborates it.

[Jason Lander]

I'm glad it was helpful.

[Jim Y]

My company has a fan page on Facebook, but it hasn't done us a lot of good so far. Still, it's a nice link to have back to the business.

[Jason Lander]

Thanks for the feedback Jim. To be honest, our company hasn't seen much of a return on the social networking participation either. I'm hoping that it's just because we're a bit ahead of the curve. Time will tell.

The other day I heard a great question and answer on the value of social networking. The question to a panelist was "what is the ROI of participating in social networking." His answer was "I don't know yet...but what is the ROI of not participating?"

I thought it was a great answer.