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Background: Heart disease and stroke are the first and fifth leading causes of death in the United States. Million Hearts® is a national initiative—co-led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services—with an ambitious goal to prevent 1 million heart attacks and strokes in 5 years. The Million Hearts® team relies heavily on social media to connect and communicate with the general public, health practitioners, and partner organizations working together to achieve this goal.
Program background: The Million Hearts® Facebook page is used daily to engage Facebook users in conversations about cardiovascular health and to share reliable tools, resources, and health information with consumers, providers, and partners. The page currently has 67,121 followers and reaches an average of 114,000 Facebook users per month.
Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm favors paid promotion, guaranteeing pages are able to send high-priority messages to a wider audience than a typical post might reach. Regularly implementing “boost posts”—a form of Facebook content advertising—has helped the initiative reach social media milestones in a simple and low-cost way.
Evaluation Methods and Results: Million Hearts® social media managers follow guidelines when making decisions about appropriate content to boost—focusing efforts on posts that perform well organically, are timely or related to a priority health observance, and have an obvious call-to-action. Page managers also continuously analyze content performance data to inform advertising decisions. Adhering to these best practices as well as data-driven decision-making has contributed to significant increases in content reach and engagement. During American Heart Month 2016—for instance— Million Hearts® Facebook page content reached more than 450,000 users and received over 20,000 engagements (likes, comments, shares, clicks). Five out of 50 posts were boosted during the month. These five posts accounted for 71% of the total monthly reach and 77% of the total monthly engagement. This example is representative of success seen in other priority observance months, during which boost posts played a key role in outreach.
Conclusions: To reach your audience in today’s overcrowded social media environment, paid content promotion may be necessary. However, advertising can be intimidating even to large organizations with multiple resources and vast social media experience. Paid content promotion is a simple, low-cost, and extremely effective advertising option for organizations of all sizes. As an experienced leader in the government social media space, Million Hearts® is in an excellent position to share valuable information with conference attendees looking to improve their Facebook performance.
Implications for research and/or practice: If communciations teams wish to effectively reach audiences in need of reilable health information where they are, they will need to understand and implement social media best practices. This means leveraging Facebook content promotion opportunities. Facebook's content delivery algorith favors advertisers, and thus it will become increasingly difficult to reach Facebook users without adopting paid content promotion.