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How Ochsner Health Reaches New Audiences on Social—and Doubled its Engagement

Some messages just resonate more when they come from a person rather than a corporation. Recognizing this, the Ochsner brand ambassador program empowers employees to publish content through their personal social media accounts.

Originally launched with a handful of volunteers who were already active on social media, today the program holds regular recruitment drives, offering prizes for high performers and even credits towards an employee’s annual appraisal.

Ochsner currently has 431 ambassadors signed up representing employees from across the organization. The goal is to reach 500 additional active ambassadors this year and scale the program beyond that in the years to come.

Hootsuite Amplify allows ambassadors to customize and publish social posts from a preapproved menu of fresh content.

To protect their reputation, brands need to be able to quickly find and respond to negative conversations on social media. Using Talkwalker, Ochsner can track negative sentiment and spot critical comments on social media.Welch said, “We’ve always tried to stay on top of comments, but the process was manual. Talkwalker automates this, crawling through social platforms to spot issues. We have far more robust processes in place for funnelling potential risks through the organization.’’Ochsner now maintains a list of approved responses to common, negative feedback, and has established a formalized process for more serious complaints. There are clear service-level agreements on how the business will log, track, and close out an issue. Daffin said “We’re faster and more consistent in our response.’’

When the pandemic struck in 2020, Ochsner found itself on the front line of the battle with COVID-19. As events unfolded, the authenticity of Ochsner’s social content helped the public through confusing, frightening moments.Katherine Staiano, director of Digital Content, said, “This has been a fast-moving situation. Social allows us to respond quickly to misinformation with trusted medical experts. We can take to Facebook Live to address a new rumor, and crank a lot of content based on solid, factual data.”The company’s listening-informed strategy also proved to be a valuable asset in helping it combat online misinformation.Hootsuite has helped Ochsner identify the best approaches for combating misinformation campaigns. “Social has been vital in quelling fears. We’re lucky to have doctors and nurses who can speak about these issues,” Staiano said.

Ochsner regularly refreshes and renews membership in its brand ambassador program. The goal is to encourage ambassadors to post more personal, authentic content, rather than simply publishing posts from an approved list. Ochsner is also looking at using UpContent to surface non-branded content on topics that matter to specific audience niches.Ochsner also plans to increase investment in its thought leadership program, where senior management publishes content through their personal social media profiles. Adding a competitive scorecard of the most commented and retweeted posts has generated a huge uptick in engagement in the program, Daffin adds.

By shifting its focus to the human and authentic side of business, Ochsner has seen success in its overall social program. In fact, in 2019 their social program drove 3% of traffic to the corporate website, and by 2020 this grew to 5%. “This is pretty impressive considering our organic traffic surged with COVID and social still grew despite a significant increase in acquisition channels,” says Alexandra Gaudin, supervisor of Digital Content.“Our next goal is to increase our followers across all social channels. With 32,000 employees, we have an unlimited number of amazing stories. We know we can create the content audiences want to engage with.” says Daffin.