Last week I was out of the office on Thursday afternoon to participate on a TV program called the Iowa Journal, produced by Iowa Public Television.

Paul Yeager, the show’s host, contacted me a few weeks prior regarding my recent hire as director of social media at the Iowa Hospital Association and asked me to appear in the studio to join their discussion on social media.

In the studio I was joined by Michael Libbie, principal and owner of Insight Advertising, Marketing & Communications, a Des Moines-based advertising agency that specializes in traditional media messages from print to television to social media. Michael also hosts a number of radio shows in the Des Moines market dealing with issues revolving around advertising and the rural lifestyle.

Iowans connecting with social media

Paul Yeager opened the show with some descriptive analysis of the various social media platforms in use today, while our 19 minute studio session made up the second portion of the half hour program.

Our discussion covered several questions about what social media is, how businesses are using it and whether or not it is making our lives better. Michael Libbie described how Insight Advertising has leveraged these new types of tools to the benefit of their clients. My role on the program was to talk about why I was hired at IHA and how we are using social media to interact with our member hospitals and health care professionals across Iowa.

Watch the episode online

This episode of the Iowa Journal also featured a friend of mine who has started his own social media consulting company, Lava Row, and includes footage from a tweetup, a meet up of Twitter users, held in Des Moines a month ago.

You can watch this episode of the Iowa Journal in its entirety on the IPTV website.

For more on the day’s activities, take a look at the post on Paul Yeager’s blog, Public Paul and Media, or Michael Libbie’s post on the Insight Advertising blog.

According to a recent social media study by Michael Stelzner, an overwhelming majority (88%) of marketers say they are using some form of social media to market their business (Marketing Charts).

Survey respondents report that the top benefit of social media marketing is gaining attention for the business, and with 81% of all marketers indicating that their social media efforts have generated that exposure, those efforts appear to be paying off in a big way.

Improving traffic and growing marketing lists is the second major benefit, according to the study, followed by building new partnerships. The study also found more than half of participants reported that a major benefit of social media marketing is the resultant rise in search engine rankings that often comes with increased efforts.

Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook

The top four social media tools being used by all marketers are Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn and Facebook, respectively. Twitter holds the top spot prominently with 86% of respondents saying they are using it.

Numbers for Twitter have not penetrated quite so far in the heath care marketing world, but a report from Ed Bennet says that there are 160 hospitals (out of 250 he is tracking) with Twitter accounts. The next most used social media tool  by hospitals is YouTube, then Facebook and blogs.

Bennett is the manager of web strategy at University of Maryland Medical System and maintains the “Hospital Social Network List” on his personal blog.

Iowa hospitals are also engaged in social media, Twitter

To our knowledge there are five hospitals in Iowa using at least one of the social media tools above, and four of whom are using Twitter.

Similar to Bennett’s list, we’ve developed our own for tracking Iowa hospitals using social media. This list can be used as a reference to see what others are doing in the space. If you’re doing this stuff and not on the list, please post in the comments below with links to your initiatives.

You can also follow the Iowa Hospital Association on Twitter as @iowahospital. We post links to relevant Iowa stories, share health care industry resources, communicate with other health care professionals and promote the people, places and achievements of Iowa hospitals.

If you have questions about any of the statistics above or about how your hospital can be leveraging social media in your communication strategy, feel free to send in your questions or add them as comments on this post.

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Being the only hospital 100% open in Fargo has led to the need for quick decision-making in regards to the dissemination of information, especially while they’ve still got an entire hospital to run. Read more