[Updated] Social Media Strategy Review: Apollo Hospitals

This review is a part of our ‘Social Media Strategy Review’ series, where we do a 360 degree analysis of a brand’s entire social media activity. You can read the reviews of more brands here.

In today's day and age, when communication has been completely revolutionized by various technological developments, it has become increasingly important for even a hospital to talk about its services and facilities, in order to cut through the noise and give people pertinent information. The growing importance of social media to facilitate this communication cannot be overlooked. The management of Apollo Hospitals knows this fact, and they have taken a step forward in order to engage people via social media. In this article, my goal is to analyze the effectiveness of the various steps taken by the hospital, and how successful it has been in their goal.

Audience Analysis of Apollo Hospitals

Falling ill is not something a person bothers about when one is young, but keeping their health in the best condition is at the top of one's mind when youth subsides, and personal concern for one's health grows with every passing year. This is a kind of truism which we instinctively understand, and is supported by the audience graph provided by Apollo Hospitals. In the following image you will see how true the aforementioned statement is, and it is clearly evident that the older a person gets, the frequency of their visits to healthcare providers like Apollo rises as well.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

The brand has a good social media following, but it has been observed that men are participating more on the brand's various social media platform (as you can see in the image below).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Out of all the online conversations about Apollo Hospitals, 43.79% is positive, 37.9% is neutral and 18.31% is negative.

Overall Strategy

At the core of all social media activities that Apollo Hospitals has undertaken, lies their intention to keep various stakeholders engaged with relevant content, and to build and maintain their authority in the niche. The brand uses platform-specific content to engage their stakeholders and inform them about the things they care about, in a way that is suitable for the platform on which the content is shared.

Apollo Hospitals on Facebook

Apollo Hospitals not only has more than 10 lakh fans on Facebook, it has also caused a sustained engagement on its page. As you can see in the image below, the average engagement for the page over 30 days has been around 5,000, and almost never dipping very low – a pattern which I have not seen in too many brands I have studied so far.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

The brand has also succeeded in eliciting tons of responses on the posts it has made on its Facebook page, which can be proved if you observe the image posted below, showing the average response it has received on posts it had made in the last 30 days. And the per fan engagement on the page is pretty good as well, as you can see in the second image posted below.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

The quality of posts that goes up on Apollo's wall is the main reason behind such sustained engagement. As you can see in the following two images, the hospital group has appropriated the health and blood donation cause to drive engagement, with very nicely done graphics used on the posts.

Overall, Apollo Hospitals' Facebook activities have been very apt for the category, having taken a broad enough view of the sector. Apollo uses Facebook to share information about the individual, family, and society's health. Their different posts target different sections of the industry, and in totality, cover everything.

To prove the point, I am sharing below a post from the page where the hospital has used tourism (health tourism) to further the cause of personal and social health and well-being. Apollo's Facebook page suggests what a vast category healthcare is and how many resources a brand like Apollo Hospitals can target.

Apollo Hospitals on Twitter

At the time this article was being written, Apollo had a little above 4,600 fans on Twitter, where too the brand has done a wonderful job. It does not only create engaging tweets, an example of which can be seen below, but it also engages people who tweet about not feeling well. The hospital brand keeps an eye on the Twitter-verse and goes out of its way to extend a solution to the problem tweeted (see the second tweet below).

The team managing Apollo's social media activities seems to have a good enough understanding of the platform, as the information shared on it is in small and easily digestible sizes, to take an analogy from the health sector (see the image below).

Apollo Hospitals also run some occasional contests to engage its audience. And contrary to what most people will expect of a contest run on the Twitter page of a hospital, contests on Apollo Hospital's page is quite interesting. In the following image you can see how the brand has appropriated health food and created a contest around it.

On Twitter as well, the brand has done a remarkable job. It has created some very engaging content and matched the content with the platform and participants there.

Comparison with competitor

Fortis Healthcare, another major hospital and healthcare group, which came into being 18 years after Apollo began is journey, is a major competitor in the healthcare sector. Like the studied brand, it too has a strong presence on social media.

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Because of its small fan-base, even the engaging content does not get as many fans as it should. The quality of the images and excessive use of its brand colour in all the posts' background could also be the reason behind such lackluster performance.

The brand should have used colors more wisely instead of painting the background of almost all its posts green (see the image below). This has probably added to low average engagement per post (see the second image below).

Source: Simplify360 – A Social Media Analytics Tool

Apollo Hospitals Elsewhere

Apollo hospital is also present on YouTube, LinkedIn, and SlideShare, along with maintaining an active blog. Apollo uses all these platforms to share health-related knowledge, and recent discoveries and findings in the field to strengthen its thought leadership in the sector. This will help Apollo Hospitals fortify its brand equity.

The hospital group uses YouTube to share and host videos on healthcare, as well as sharing health tips which it posts on various social media platforms. An example of the content shared can be seen in the following video. The video is well-dramatized and the first-aid steps have been nicely explained using appropriate video technique (camera angle, lights, etc.). Apart from sharing videos, Apollo also writes good informative articles on its blog, aptly named Let's Talk Health.

The content shared on SlideShare is also informative, and establishes the brand's authority position. The LinkedIn page is also nicely done, with the updates in-sync with the content expectations of people on the professional networking platform. You can see an example of it in the following image.

Conclusion

If one has to find an example of a good social media strategy, and almost flawless execution, one should be referred to Apollo Hospital's social media pages.

The brand has done a remarkable job on almost all the platforms in all departments – creating content, matching it with the requisite platform, engaging fans and followers, and presenting it professionally. There are a few shortcomings, but nothing too big to worry about; moreover, I'd not like to bring such small things forward to sour the good taste that I got from reviewing social media strategy of Apollo Hospitals.

It feels like having a nice sumptuous meal after a long time. I only wish that the health care services of Apollo Hospitals had been as good as the social media activities of the brand! Or at least, half as good as this, if matching the standard appears too daunting a task for the doctors there.

Expert View:

A good social media strategy starts from the demographic that you have targeted. The targeting for Apollo Hospitals has been bang on with 50 percent of audience above 40 years which ensures that their health oriented content actually gets responses.

Apollo is a great example of good targeting + good content strategy = effective social media.

One thing that should be kept in mind, is that a strategy like this can get monotonous over time, so sooner or later Apollo will have to reinvent itself and be more value oriented than just content and tips.

Overall, it has been a good effort by the brand.

Expert View by Rajiv Dingra Founder & CEO of WATConsult – An Award Winning Social Media Agency.

Analytics support courtesy: Simplify360