If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an Instagram account must be worth a million, right? Using my favorite mobile app as a guide, I got to know more about Aria’s two newest team members: account executive Courtney Landi and account coordinator Kahler Buckley. Here’s what I learned:

Facebook has been in hot water ever since the news broke that Cambridge Analytica, a political data consulting firm, harvested private data on over 50 million Facebook users without the users' permission. This is just one of many scandals that Facebook has had to weather recently, including recent criticism over the role it played in the 2016 election. With the #DeleteFacebook movement gaining momentum, and brands such as Tesla and Pep Boys removing their company pages from the platform, Facebook is facing a massive PR nightmare.

There is a plethora of social media platforms to choose from nowadays, but it can be difficult to determine which to leverage for your business. When it comes to healthcare IT, matching the social platform with the business goal you are trying to achieve (e.g. attracting customers, prospects and employees) is key. In this post we will review three newer social media applications and explain which marketing goals each can help you achieve.

Though the healthcare industry is typically slower than others to modernize, most healthcare IT companies have taken the leap and fully embraced the power of social media. At Aria Marketing, we manage social media accounts for many of our clients, including precision medicine company 2bPrecise. More recently, spurred on by the pandemic, we’ve delved into some paid social media campaigns in an effort to better target an audience and drive engagement.

As PR professionals, it’s our job to stay on top of the news so that we can find relevant story angles and leverage hot topics to guide our media relations outreach for clients. In the healthcare space, we are fortunate to have a number of great publications we read and work with every day, including Healthcare IT News, Becker’s Hospital Review and Medical Economics, to name a few.

But, besides reading the trades every day, there are other traditional and non-traditional outlets we turn to to learn more about the politics of healthcare, to take a deeper dive on a particular topic or to get the breaking news as it happens. Here are some of the sources we tap to stay “in the know” on all the latest and greatest issues in healthcare:

…and no one is around to hear… you know the rest. It’s a philosophical question for the ages. I have a similar query for my marketing and PR colleagues. If you create a great piece of content, but no one sees it, does it even matter? We’ve all been told that content is king, and if that is in fact true, then distribution is surely queen. A king without subjects (like content without an audience) wouldn’t be much of a king at all.

As we all (should) know, social media is a valuable, even essential, tool for connecting businesses with a wider audience. At Aria Marketing, in addition to our public relations work, we lead social media programs for our healthcare clients, developing organic and paid content to boost sales and increase their digital reach. Through social media channels, our clients can share relevant news stories, promote recent coverage, and connect with other industry leaders. But, creating great social media content can only go so far; engagement from employees and a broader audience is needed to propel the content, and company, forward.

While we were unable to join last week’s HITMC chat on virtual events, we were so interested in the topic that we were inspired to sit down with our client, Elizabeth Glaser, AVP of Strategic Marketing at 2bPrecise, a precision medicine software company, to discuss what it takes to run a successful virtual event in the healthcare IT world.

Read on for insights about how she develops webinars for 2bPrecise and attracts attendees, and what she thinks the future of events will look like in a post-COVID world.

1. Get personal

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increased struggle with mental health nationwide, as support systems have changed or dissipated. As folks are cooped up at home and facing national and personal tragedy, many look to social media for comfort and escape.

As a PR agency that specializes in healthcare, we rely on Twitter as a way to stay up to speed on all of the breaking news and policy changes that occur on an hourly basis in today’s 24/7 media world. More than that, Twitter is also a way for us to show our personality, engage with other industry experts, debate a hot topic, or take ourselves a little less seriously. Whether you are looking for a way to stay up to date on the latest news in healthcare IT or looking for a little entertainment, here are some of the Aria team’s favorite Twitter accounts:

Wow, it feels like just yesterday I was Googling “how to pronounce interoperability” while Ubering to my first interview for an internship with Aria Marketing. Not only did I think I would never figure out the correct pronunciation, but I also never could have imagined what the following two years (and counting) had in store.

Over the past 15 years, LinkedIn has changed the way people network, interact with their professional audience and even apply/recruit for job openings. With more than 500 million professionals actively using the site, getting your company onboard should be a no-brainer. While we can digress into a number of different uses of this professional platform, this blog will focus on our top recommendations for leveraging LinkedIn for your organization.