Eldercare Organizations Share Experiences with Social Media Marketing

Therese Frare, IlluminAge Communications & Marketing Specialist

Social media is the BUZZ side of your marketing and it offers a give and take approach—it is a conversation. It is the place in your marketing where you can tell stories, share information that others consider relevant, interesting and worthy of passing along to their friends and family.

If you are ready to start a social media program, you will want to know how other senior care organizations are using Facebook and Twitter.  How did these organizations start their program and what tips do they have that can help your organization?

IlluminAge Communication Partners recently gathered some social media tips from several of our clients, including a home health care provider, an area agency on aging, a retirement community and a skilled nursing facility.  All these organizations integrate their communications by linking out to their social media from their website and many include social media links on their email signatures.

Jonathan Martin, Vice President of Franchise Development for Retire-At-Home, a home health company with 14 locations in Canada, started a social media program seven months ago. Retire-At-Home has a Twitter account with over 200 followers and plans to launch a Facebook page. Martin feeds the Twitter account with links to stories of interest to both families of seniors and to franchise owners. One of his sources for interesting stories is Choices, Retire-At-Home’s monthly online newsletter they create with assistance from IlluminAge. These tweets have the added benefit of driving traffic to the online newsletter and building the subscription list.

One of Martin’s goals was to avoid being overwhelmed by social media and to spend only 15 minutes per day looking for stories to tweet about. “It is very easy to get lost in the world of sitting in front of your computer, but it has to turn into results,” said Martin. “It has to turn into new clients or new franchise owners.”

Martin worked with a social media expert, who helped to define the target audience and the message, and also offered methods for tracking where new business is coming from. Having this action plan in place has been very helpful.

“We wanted to create more brand awareness online,” Martin said. “We will know if it is successful when we get new clients. The jury is still out as to if this will increase revenue.”  He added, “For a non-profit there is so much goodwill that can be built with social media. For a profit-driven business, it is harder to figure out how best to use it.”

Sarah Hoban, Communications and Development Specialist for Barrington Area Council on Aging in Barrington, IL (BACOA), has a Facebook account with over 60 friends, who receive information on events, resources, age-friendly issues and work place issues. “By using Facebook we can reach out to more caregivers in their 40s and we can reach out to students we want to connect with for volunteering,” Hoban said.

Hoban is in charge of all the external communications for BACOA and finds that her biggest challenges are time constraints and developing proficiency in social media. “There is a definite learning curve to Facebook and if you invest in training and conferences, you have to ask yourself—is it going to pay off?” Hoban said.

IlluminAge partners with BACOA on their website development and management. “For BACOA the website is very valuable,” Hoban says. “We are not sure yet how valuable Facebook will be. But you can’t ignore it.”

Christine Bachman, Senior Director of Marketing and Public Relations for Franke Tobey Jones, a non-profit retirement community and assisted living facility in Tacoma, WA, has a brand new Facebook account with over 30 friends and the organization is thinking about starting a Twitter account as well.

“Though most people in their 80s are not on Facebook, we are trying to reach out to their adult children and their grandchildren,” Bachman said. “Our mission is to reach out to the community as a whole.”

They launched their Facebook presence with stories about an upcoming senior prom they are hosting in the community for people 55 and over. Many posts relate to prom memories, prom plans, and prom sponsorship, as well as to other upcoming events and Franke Tobey Jones’ work in the community.

Bachman does not have the time to maintain the Facebook page, so she is currently working with an outside advertising agency who directs the social media plan, administers the Facebook page and posts the content that Bachman sends.

“Social media is so new. For people of my generation—the boomers—it can be confusing. Now I know how my parents must have felt when computers came out,” Bachman said. “But you have to learn it. You have to do it.”

Catherine Reis-El Bara, Administrator for Highland Care Center, a skilled nursing home and rehabilitation center in Bellingham, WA, has a Facebook account with over 30 friends.  Highland posts upcoming events, in loving memories, meeting notices, and thank yous.

“Our goal with Facebook is to help family members see what residents are doing in real time—what they are doing today,” said Reis-El Bara. She would also like to see the staff use Facebook as a way for them to communicate with each other and send out invitations to events, and other pertinent information.

Highland started using Facebook after Reis-El Bara attended a workshop on social media, and they have been posting more regularly in the last couple of months. Their list of friends has grown, but not as much as Reis-El Bara had hoped.

For staffing, Highland works with a high school intern who allocates about two hours per week to Facebook. When working with an intern, Reis El-Bara said that it is important to offer direction about what to post and also to train the intern on the key communication messages of the facility.

“Facebook has grown from being all for the kids and teens into something for people in their 40s and 50s,” Reis-El Bara said.

If you decide to invest in social media marketing, be sure to integrate your social media strategy with the balance of your marketing efforts, including your website, print and broadcast advertising, print brochures, public relations, event marketing and eNewsletters.

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