How Social Cascade automates a solution and keeps you in the driver's seat
Anyone who's worked in social media will tell you the hardest part of their job is constantly building and searching for content. Even those casually posting on social media know the hours you have to pour into editing images and text, play with animations and sound, and so much more. Having a whole production studio in our phones is incredible, but the tech giants should have included the staff! Social media team capacity is the most significant factor hindering teams from finding, developing, and launching new content. Even with the emergence of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard, team capacity is augmented by making some tasks in content development more efficient.
Regarding social media in healthcare, we know pictures of newborns or weddings in the hospital chapel get huge engagement rates. But with patients spending an average of 95 minutes a day - the equivalent of 24 days a year - scrolling social media, compared to the 3 hours a year we average in a healthcare setting (primarily spent in waiting rooms), there is a significant opportunity to extend those office visits with critical information on social media. The best part, no one has to send a text message or download a new app. One of the five apps we open daily is almost always social media. Patients are there, and they are waiting.
So, why isn't patient education content the solution all healthcare social media teams are pumping out?
Well, health is a local topic. And in some cases, big-brand health systems manage dozens of hospitals and outpatient clinics across communities or even states. Ideally, social media would meet patients visiting each of these offices locally to engage them and their health within their community, but that would be 1,722,593 Facebook and Instagram accounts to manage. An exaggeration, but it's a lot and certainly more than the capacity of any social media team we've ever met. So we need technology to help scale the teams that manage social media so they can meet patients locally with relevant messages. We can eliminate one size fits all public health messaging forever.
Enter Social Cascade.
We built Social Cascade to tackle this problem - scale social media teams to be the experts they are and feed the content beast on their behalf. Here's how it works:
Social Cascade partners with local and national health organizations already developing amazing content for patients, families, and caregivers.
We load their content into our system.
Social media teams connect social accounts to our platform and subscribe to national and local content for each account.
Social Cascade takes over from there, intelligently scheduling content. Social Media teams can easily monitor social schedules and make changes as needed. They can even add their own content stream for branded marketing content.
Patients, parents, and caregivers can simply follow their health providers on Facebook and Instagram.
Social Media teams get all the analytics across all the accounts, helping them analyze what's working and where to focus time and energy.
Localizing Content
We have built six key components into our software to localize health messaging:
Local health organizations. Not only do we partner with national organizations, but we all partner with organizations in every community. Organizations that focus on helping their community with products and services - especially free and subsidized services like food and diaper banks, local parks and recreation offices, public libraries, and many more. Part of our 20-minute onboarding meeting includes identifying desired local partnerships for each customer. Local organizations are experts in their communities. They understand the needs that exist. We help amplify their message and use the medical home to communicate with patients and their families.
Language & culture. What makes local health effective is the understanding of community demographics. Local organizations often represent their community and can easily communicate most effectively through language and culture. By partnering with local organizations, these languages and cultures are captured in their health messages. Our system learns from their expertise and understands what languages to use at each clinic.
Imagery. National and state-level public health messages are often distributed with a representative image or video. However, much of the imagery used is likely irrelevant to many communities the message is intended to reach. Understanding when images of city blocks or vast open fields, mountains, or shorelines are relevant in imagery is helpful in localizing messages. When scrolling, such images are instantly relevant.
Locally engaging. With each post that a hospital, clinic, or health provider delivers through our system, we monitor hundreds of data points that help us understand which content and what messages are working. We use this information to prioritize content that optimizes engagement across health topics and the organizations each account has subscribed to.
Local health priorities - Non-profit hospitals are required to regularly conduct community health needs assessments (CHNA) and then invest dollars into the community accordingly. In addition, local departments of health conduct community health assessments (CHA) about every 3-5 years. The combination of these assessments results in community feedback about the most pressing issues facing their community and which health topics should be prioritized through investment of time, programming, and dollars. These health priorities inform our recommendation engine to consider elevating content that addresses local health priorities.
Timeliness and relevance. Lastly, we have several health seasons across communities. Nationally, we have a cold and flu season. Other communities have beach seasons or skiing seasons. Each comes with opportunities to share valuable health information at the right time. Our health media team also monitors public health data. When there was a spike in RSV across communities this past winter, we were able to tune our recommendation engine to prioritize relevant RSV content for affected communities.
Each key component is a full-time job for managing a single social media account. Our software is designed to enable teams to execute these key components in concert and at scale while giving teams time to focus on their expertise.
What we are working on. We are researching composable diffusion as a technique to generate alternative messages, content, and posts optimized for each community. This is a long-term vision of Social Cascade to push technology to augment human capacity so that expertise is applied where critical in the loop that ultimately feeds the social media content beast.
