Social Media Marketing Policy
Introduction
Over the years, social media has rapidly developed to a recognized digital marketing platform, where individuals, corporations, and companies advertise and distribute their products and services to their customers. Wide coverage of social media has created awareness of existing new brands of products and services to the potential customers, thus facilitating to the growth and development of the global economy. Through the social media, millions of customers across the world have been able to access products and services at the comfort of their home environments. Social media marketing is associated with various socio-economic benefits which include, improved brand awareness and brand loyalty, effective engagement of customers, customer satisfaction, marketplace awareness, enhanced SEO rankings, and more brand authority. Additionally, social media marketing is cost-effective and leads to increased website traffic through easier sharing of information regarding the products, thus giving customers every reason to click on ones’ social media platform. However, there are various limitations associated with this type of marketing. The process is time consuming since the brand owner has to stay engaged and active in the platform to avoid missing out a customer. Negative feedback can lead tarnishing of the brand name, which will result to low demand, thus huge losses. Depends heavily on ads which compromises the products’ and company’s security and privacy policies (Alobaidi, 2018).
Social Media Marketing in Healthcare sector
Healthcare sector, just like any other business organization, uses social media tools to execute most of the activities carried out in the organization, thus ensuring the safety of the patients, workers, and other stakeholders. Areas in which the healthcare providers use the social media tools in are, sharing information across the units, promoting health behavior practices in the community, educating and interacting with patients, students, suppliers, caregivers, etc. Besides, the media tools are used to facilitate collegial communication, thus an effective way of implementing new policies regarding the well-being of patients, and healthcare providers. Although the use of social media marketing in healthcare is associated with challenges such as patients’ confidentiality and privacy violation/isolation which results to formidable consequences, the process’s benefits outweigh the drawbacks.
Policy formulation regarding use of social media in healthcare sector.
To ensure that the use of social media marketing tools is effectively regulated in healthcare organizations for patients’ and service providers’ safety, various policies regarding social media marketing needs to be implemented. As the chief nursing officer in Citam Nursing Home, I am obligated to policymaking and implementation responsibilities. Having identified a problem regarding the isolation of patients’ confidentiality and privacy caused by the misuse of the social media tools, I created policies and procedures aimed at mitigating the issue, and promoting safety in the workplace and ensuring high-quality patient care, in compliance to WHO regulatory. One of the policies that I created for implementation by the organizational management was to minimize or avoid completely the use of media tools to share patients’ information from one clinical unit or hospital to another through the use of Healthcare Common Procedure systems (HCPs), which are prone to breaching patient’s information along the way. This issue can be very damaging to any patient’s state of mind, and can adversely affect their health statuses.
I also created the policy regarding the overuse of media tools for personal interests amongst nurses and healthcare providers. The policy states that healthcare providers should only use the media while debating about any policy regarding work, or organizational concerns. No personal deals should be conducted through the media during the working hours, unless during emergency cases relating to one’s personal issues. My reason for creating this policy was because I had identified a few media-addicted healthcare providers and nurses, and who spent most of their working hours browsing, thus ended up offering poor quality services to the patients and even neglecting some of their roles completely.
Policies and American Nurses Association’s (ANA) ethical codes.
While creating the policies, I ensured that they aligned with the American Nurses Association’s policy formulation principles. Principle number 6 of ANA states that nurses and healthcare providers should participate in establishing, maintaining, and improving the healthcare environments and promote the working conditions, thus ensuring quality service provision to patients. Therefore, if the nurses and healthcare providers neglect their duties and invest in social media, they will have not only neglected the needs of their patients, but will have also violated ANA’ s code of ethics (De Gagne et al., 2018).
I also proposed that patient’s medical information not to be shared or communicated between different units or hospitals through the social media. I had identified the recklessness in some healthcare providers when communicating a patient’s condition or referring them from one unit or hospital to another. The actions compromised patients’ medical confidentiality and privacy, a factor that endangered their health statuses. According to ANA’s principles’, medical information of a patient should remain a secret between them and healthcare providers or nurses. The information should only be disclosed to a third party with the patient’s consent, or in an emergency case when the patient is at the verge of losing their life and help is required from an experienced healthcare provider (De Gagne et al., 2018). Therefore, if the recklessness in the usage of the social media in healthcare is not mitigated, what we will be offering as an organization will be poor quality services to our patients, thus endangering their lives rather than safeguarding them.
Elements of the recommended professional filters in policy making in the healthcare sector
While creating the policies, I put into consideration various factors; the benefits and drawbacks of the policy implementation, the contributions by the nurse representatives in all the clinical units, the implication of the policy implementation to the managers, nurse, suppliers, patients, and other stakeholders in the healthcare organization. Besides, I engaged policy makers and analysts in policy formulation to ensure that the policies follow the Procedure Developmental Guidelines in relation to healthcare sector and in association with the social media services. The policy-makers and analysts helped in defining the eligibility of the policy, and established how it would be effectively implemented in the healthcare sector without inconveniencing any involved party; i.e., the healthcare providers, the media services, patients, and the community at large (Sahoo et al., 2019).
Policy development procedures and guidelines
While creating the above policies, I followed certain policy development guidelines as analyzed in the Patient Safety and Quality Healthcare (PSQH) article. I established the main purpose of the policy formulation, policy compatibility with the already existing policies, anticipated impacts of policy implementation, policy standardization processes, room for policy reviewal, and the process of implementation. Having considered these guidelines and other necessary guidelines regarding the implementation of healthcare-related policies and based on the usage of social-media marketing tools, I was confident that the policies would be embraced by the organizational management and immediate implementation executed (Garcia-Garzon et al., 2016). I was also certain that the implementation of these policies would enhance quality of services offered by the nurses to patients, thus safeguarding their health statuses.
References
Alobaidi, E. (2018). Outline to the advantages and disadvantages of social media. ACADEMICIA: An International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, 8(4), 4-11.
https://www.webfx.com/internet-marketing/social-media-marketing-advantages-and-disadvantages.html
De Gagne, J. C., Yamane, S. S., Conklin, J. L., Chang, J., & Kang, H. S. (2018). Social media use and cybercivility guidelines in US nursing schools: A review of websites. Journal of Professional Nursing, 34(1), 35-41.
https://www.nursingworld.org/~4af4f2/globalassets/docs/ana/ethics/social-networking.pdf
Garcia-Garzon, E., Zhukovsky, P., Haller, E., Plakolm, S., Fink, D., Petrova, D., … & Ruggeri, K. (2016). Multilevel modeling and policy development: guidelines and applications to medical travel. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 752.
Sahoo, A. K., Pradhan, C., Barik, R. K., & Dubey, H. (2019). DeepReco: deep learning based health recommender system using collaborative filtering. Computation, 7(2), 25.
https://canberra.libguides.com/evidence
Saraogi, N. L. P. A. (2018). How social media is Transforming Pharma and Healthcare. Applied Clinical Trials, 27(2).