Building Awareness through Social Media
Westchester Medical Center (WMC)
 

ORGANIZATION
Westchester Medical Center (WMC) is the region’s advanced care and Level 1 Trauma Center serving the 3.5 million people in New York's Hudson Valley. As an academic partner of New York Medical College, Westchester is advancing the quality of the nation’s health through the latest innovations in medical care, teaching, and research.

CHALLENGE
With a strategic branding plan developed by Princeton Partners Health already in place, Westchester Medical Center knew the next step was to build a strong network of brand advocates, while driving traffic to specific service lines. WMC sought the expertise of PPH in launching a social media strategy.

SOLUTION
PPH worked with WMC to launch a robust social media strategy designed to build awareness of WMC’s specialized service lines, while also helping WMC command more space on search-engine results pages. PPH developed channel-specific content development and monitoring strategies for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia.org, and other social media sites, along with an inbound-linking strategy. With posts and content thematically aligned with the Unifying Brand Idea (UBI) of “Transforming Healthcare,” the strategy centers on the idea that all roads lead back to the website – the central destination for WMC’s service-line-specific healthcare information.

RESULTS
PPH and WMC recognized positive results almost immediately from each of the social media channels. Specifically:

Additionally, the campaign was honored with two Gold Aster Awards in the TV Advertising (Single Spot) and Magazine Advertising (Series) categories.

• Wikipedia traffic spiked by 119% after the content was optimized to align with the new strategy. Wikipedia now accounts for 63% of social media traffic to the main site.
• WMC has taken brand ownership of its Facebook presence, topping the results list when “Westchester Medical Center” is searched within Facebook. There has been a 60% month-over-month increase in traffic from the site.
• WMC’s new YouTube channel reached 1,000 views in 40% of the time it took a competitor and has so far ranked as high as 12th in organic search results.
• More than 1,100 followers added WMC on Twitter, including consumers, referring physicians, the press, and policymakers.

The strategy, together with the tactical implementation, increased the visibility of WMC on Google’s first page of search results, improving brand awareness while also providing an engaging forum by which brand advocates can tell the medical center’s story to their peers online.

CREATIVE
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