Chapter Awarded Yerger for Social Media Posts

By | June 4, 2019

This month we are filling you in on more details about the Yerger Awards that the Chapter won this year.  Chapters can apply for the Yerger Award for work that they have done during the year that helps to bring exceptional educational and social experiences to its members. Last week’s blog detailed the Yerger Award we won for our work in Digital Communication, which involved our conversion from a paper newsletter to a digital blog, and created a more innovative communication channel while reducing costsThe next award we won was titled:

Expanding the Reach of LinkedIn Social Media Posts – Targeted Outreach and “Promoted” Posts

The HFMA MA-RI Chapter has excellent educational programs, and we have wondered if we could do more to increase awareness of these programs beyond the current membership.  We devised a LinkedIn promotional campaign for two educational programs, set a goal to obtain LinkedIn “impressions” (views) and click throughs to our website regarding the events, and then measured the results against LinkedIn benchmarks.  We had an additional goal to obtain new attendees and measured year-over-year data to test the results.  While these were our specific goals, through awareness-enhancing efforts such as these, particularly if done consistently and in conjunction with other outreach efforts, we also hope to increase or at least stabilize overall event attendance, and potentially increase new membership.

We selected two educational programs for the effort:  our New to HealthCare (NTH) program in September 2018 and our Revenue Cycle (Rev Cycle) program at Gillette Stadium in January 2019.  These events were selected because they traditionally have been able to draw a fair number of non-member attendees.  Based on our past success with non-member attendance, we deduced that these two particular events might spark the most interest in those on LinkedIn who are either casually or not yet aware of HFMA’s offerings.

We first carefully prepared LinkedIn posts that were intended to grab the eye and contain all needed information.  Leveraging our existing Chapter LinkedIn page, we then selected specific, tailored targeting parameters (age, industry, job titles) for each campaign.  After our postings, we evaluated the performance of these “promoted posts” in two ways:  (1) the number of impressions and clicks-throughs, and (2) year-over-year attendance of “new” persons to NTH and Rev Cycle.    Based on our analytics, we hit our goals for the campaign, achieving higher click-through rates than LinkedIn benchmarks, and improving our attendance of “new” persons at both events from prior years.

We will continue to use “promoted” posts in order to be able to reach our target audience for our educational programs.  You can help us reach more of your colleagues by sharing our posts on LinkedIn (@HFMA Massachusetts Rhode Island Chapter) and Twitter (@hfma_MA_RI), and using hashtags that incorporate our name.  Try it out – retweet, comment, or share this blog post by using the icons at the bottom of the page!

Next week, I will be outlining our third and final Yerger award winner:  Evolving Corporate Sponsorship into the Digital Realm