Health organizations face number of challenges when Instagramming

December 17, 2015 • Jonathan McVerry

With hundreds of millions of active users— many of them young people—the power of photo/video-sharing social network Instagram has become too big to ignore.

Just as social media managers solidified their Facebook and Twitter strategies, Instagram gained immense popularity. Late last year, it surpassed Twitter’s user total. Communicators know the visual-based platform is an important vehicle to the eyes of the public, but many are unsure about the best way to get there.

“It’s like the “wild wild west,” Marcus Messner, associate professor of mass communication at Virginia Commonwealth University, said. “You need a different strategy (than Facebook or Twitter). Instagram is almost all visual. It requires some work and resources to be effective.”

What kind of work? Over three months in 2014, Messner and Jeanine Guidry, a doctoral student at VCU, examined the Instagram posts of 18 nonprofits to find out. The researchers also conducted interviews with several of the nonprofits’ social media managers to get an in-depth understanding of how the organizations engaged followers. Organizations included the American Cancer Society, the Arthritis Foundation and the March of Dimes.

In their research, published in a special issue of the PRism journal and funded by the Arthur W. Page Center, Messner and Guidry found that nonprofit organizations use Instagram in a range of ways and varying frequency. Their results unearthed a number of challenges ranging from policy issues, staffing limitations and the ability to share both fun and difficult news in the same Instagram feed.

“By definition these health organizations are dealing with illness,” Guidry said. “So finding a balance among these challenges helps to successfully engage followers.”

A unique challenge many of the nonprofits face—especially with a visual-heavy platform like Instagram—is issues with privacy. Due to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), health-related organizations must assure patient privacy. When showcasing activities, events or photo-ops with patients, all participants must give permission before the image can be posted. This essentially goes against the spirit of social media, which embraces immediacy and candidness.

“You lose that immediacy, but we found that organizations find creative ways to get around that,” Guidry said. “Instead of posting images of patients, hospitals shared healthy recipes with their followers. They also documented special events like ‘match day,’” which is when medical students find out where they will be working.

Guidry added that many of the organizations found especially creative ways to get around a different challenge: communicating information that could be seen as upsetting. Both researchers stressed the importance for the organizations to share health information on pressing issues, which is not easy when posts can appear next to cat videos and other Internet memes.

For example, “Doctors without Borders, a fantastic organization, handled the Ebola outbreak amazingly,” Guidry said. The study occurred during the height of the outbreak. “There was a nice mix of good and bad news, and they posted images that provided hope, as well as images that expressed the seriousness of the situation.”

Naturally, Messner and Guidry found many differences in social media strategies and policies among the 18 studied nonprofits. Some organizations aimed for one post per week while one social manager said, “We are extremely active…every minute of every day” on the major social media platforms. While there were many policy differences, almost all of the nonprofits had rules on who could post and who could not.

“A lot of organizations are moving toward empowering its people,” Guidry said. “They figure virtually all of their employees are on social media posting about the lives they lead. Their jobs are a part of that, so why not get them posting for the company too?”

Organizations that have not taken this empowering step had policies that focus more on what content to post. They also have designated employees to make social media decisions and make posts on Instagram, as well as other social media platforms.

Messner and Guidry said future research should take a closer look at the followers. March of Dimes has nearly 11,000 followers on Instagram. Doctors without Borders has 178,000. Potential next steps could be to survey the people following these health organizations: How do they respond to posts? What are the conversations they are having? When do they feel most engaged?

“We are grateful for getting funding from the Page Center to make this project happen,” Messner said. “Looking at the sheer numbers on Instagram, it’s clearly too big to ignore.”

The Arthur W. Page Center is a research center within Penn State’s College of Communications. It is dedicated to the study and advancement of ethics and responsibility in corporate communication and other forms of public communication.

According to its website, PRism is a free-access, online, peer-refereed public relations and communication research journal. It was established in 2002 to meet the need for readily available, quality controlled public relations and communication research materials online.