How To Leverage Social Media To Get Visibility For Your Health Mobile App

Updated: January 24, 2024

Social media networks have a captive and blooming audience and provide countless opportunities for healthcare marketers to build significant connections with their target audience.

Despite its reputation for lagging behind other industries, it’s difficult to deny that the healthcare industry has come on in leaps and bounds when it comes to technology.

One of the latest developments that has seen a rise in popularity over the coming years has been the use of health related mobile apps.

They help provide patients with more control over their own health by giving them access to their own records, and allowing them to take further measures to improve their health, like with exercising or monitoring their medications.

This change is a great thing as it makes healthcare more accessible, but it also comes with drawbacks that you might already have noticed.

If you are yet to launch your health mobile app, you might not be aware that gaining visibility for an app isn’t an easy task, especially in the healthcare industry, where new apps are being launched onto the market every week.

The good news is that, with some research, using social media to promote your app isn’t impossible.

In fact, when HealthcareWeekly reports that 90% of millennials say they use the internet as their primary source of healthcare information, you could be massively missing out if you don’t create a social media marketing strategy for your health app.

Knowing where to start isn’t always easy, though, so here are our top tips for utilising social media in a way that will help you get visibility for your health mobile app.

Something you need to be aware of about social media from the very start is that different platfrms work for different people—and, by extension, different companies.

If your app is targeted towards other medical professionals, like an app that will allow them to find out information by using medical acronyms, then LinkedIn might be a good option for you.

This is more professional, allowing for you to make direct connections and engage with those in the industry to share your expertise in a semi-casual way.

If your app is focused on patients who want to search up symptoms to find out what their illness might be, using more informal apps like Facebook or Twitter might be the best way to go.

Alternatively, if your app is targeted towards other medical professionals and patients, like one where prescriptions can be completed on an app, then using a mix of LinkedIn and Facebook or Twitter might work best for you.

2. Use Influencers To Promote Your App

Online social media influencers have become a powerful tool in the way millennials, and those from generations after, are advertised to.

In fact, with 33 percent of users saying they downloaded an app because it was recommended by the people they trust or follow online, you could argue that this method of marketing is slowly overtaking more older, traditional advertising methods.

For that reason, getting in touch with influencers in a specific branch of the healthcare niche, like fitness, nutrition, or mental wellbeing, could be a great part of your influencer strategy.

It’s important to remember that influencers aren’t going to do this for free, though, and those you want to target are probably being pitched to several times a week with offers from similar health mobile apps.

This doesn’t mean that your app isn’t in with a shot at the right price, but you do need to make sure that you’re sending the perfect pitch email to draw them in and help you gain visibility on social media.

ComboApp recently published some useful information about what you should do when writing an effective pitch to influencers, which includes the following points:

Make sure that the influencer is a good fit for your niche

Ensure the influencer has lots of active followers, most of whom are your target audience

Offer value to the influencer and their audience, using things including exclusive offers to your app, discounts, and other enticing rewards

Commission credible influencers to provide a sneak peak to your app, and perhaps review it

3. Engage With Medical Professionals

Another way of gaining visibility on social media is to establish those behind your app as experts within your field, and a good way of doing this is to connect with other medical professionals who already have online momentum behind them.

You might think this is difficult, but online reputations matter to doctor’s now more than ever.

Often, names of established, well-praised doctors within your app’s niche can be found on Google by those who are pleased with their services, or on forums where people with health conditions connect to share their stories.

Once you have found a well-liked medical professional within your niche, simply follow them on their various social media websites and connect with them by sharing your own opinion on the things they are talking about, and asking for further information that other followers of theirs may also be interested in.

Doing this is a great use of your time as followers from the other medical professionals will notice your engagement and expertise, and may come over to explore what your app is about.

4. Be Clear On The Issue Your App Solves

You might struggle to see the relevance between being clear about the issue your app solves and social media visibility, but this has more influence on your success than you might think.

This is because word of mouth marketing is still the most powerful form of marketing, even if these conversations have gone online, where they can be seen by hundreds of thousands of people, instead of just the person someone might be talking to.

According to Digital Authority Partners just 11% of health systems offer patients apps that perform the three functions that consumers demand most.

With that in mind, can you imagine how well received your app would be online if you were to create another that solved these problems?

Take the chronic illness community, for example. If you were to create an app that allowed them to measure the levels of pain they were in daily, as well as monitor their medications, the community could rally around to recommend your app to their friends on social media.

These friends would then promote the app to their friends, and so on and so forth, until you climb up the ranks and can use other forms of marketing to make sure your health app stays at the top of its game.

Summary:

As you can see from our article, as the healthcare industry continues to delve deeper into the digital age, the ways you should market your health-related products also needs to change.

If you want to create innovative digital solutions to common healthcare problems, then you need to make sure that you are on social media, implementing at least some of the tips we have recommended above to help get your app in front of your target audience.